Thanks for the pointer to Michael Graziano’s work. One of the great difficulties in discussing attention/awareness/consciousness/self is that it often seems like everyone has their own definitions, which of course conflict with each other. Graziano says attention is something the brain does; consciousness is something the brain says it has. The more I look into theories of consciousness, the more I like model-based approaches. It appears that our minds build very simplistic models of reality in order to conserve resources and to increase applicability, i.e., the amount of reality that we have an explanation for. Donald Hoffman has done a lot of research on this approach and how it evolved to maximize a fitness function even at the cost of inaccurate representations of reality. Bottom line is that humans experience the universe and create a model of a self that is having those experiences. This model of a self is useful for explaining, understanding, and predicting how and why we do things and by extension how other people and societies act. However, it’s this separate self that seems to be in control of our thoughts and bodies and sits in our heads like a small homunculus somewhere behind our eyes that is illusory. It’s merely a construct. Consciousness is frequently defined as what it feels like to be X, for example, what it feels like to be a bat. If we define human consciousness as the experience of being a self, it follows that by that definition consciousness is also illusory. The more I learn, the more I think that everything we do is driven entirely by our subconscious and consciousness exists only to provide our subconscious with a predictive and introspective model of our own body and actions and how others interact with it. Somehow that model of a self in charge of our body must have provided a reproductive advantage to early hominids. Maybe because they could explain their behavior even if those explanations were completely inaccurate. This viewpoint is also supported by Gazzaniga’s split brain experiments where the left hemisphere of the brain comes up with explanations for what the body is doing even if those explanations are completely wrong. For example, show a message to the right hemisphere asking the person to leave the room and the left hemisphere will explain that the subject suddenly decided to go into the hall and get a soda from the vending machine.
Yes! Enjoyed what you wrote. It is amazing how the left brain makes up stuff . . . seemingly to justify behaviour it has no idea about. The model based self seems to hit the nail on the head. It's not quite non-duality but swings so close. It is incredible how the brain constructs things. It constructs a prediction then constructs an emotion about that prediction then constructs a feeling while at the same time constructing a model that someone is feeling the feeling that the brain just constructed and we go - "This is real!" I'm putting some of that in the next animation. Thanks for watching the video and writing.
@@nondualityfun I’m looking forward to your next video. Gazzaniga’s work is really thought-provoking. I remember one experiment where he asked each hemisphere what it wanted to be and got different answers. One side said draftsman and the other wrote automobile race. So it seems that the feeling of a unified consciousness is another illusion stacked on top of the illusion of the self having a consciousness in the first place. We’re all familiar with having mixed feelings about things, like whether to have dessert. Some days our health-conscious self wins and other days it’s our hedonic self that wins. Maybe Internal Family Systems has it right and our consciousness contains not just a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, but a host of competing selves that are often working at cross purposes. “For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand…and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own… so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there… and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.” ― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
So you have other channels? I had no idea. Have you ever taken a nice dose of psilocybin? My experience was a total "realization" that there is Consciousness (big C) and it's impossible to die. This seemed absurdly obvious. Even with this conviction, I still enjoy your channel. You are undeniably very smart and talented.
I've been trying to find the simplest and most concise presentation of the neuroscience perspective. Anil Seth seems to be the clearest presenter. Though this video seems to be targeted to those of us, who have experience in the recent non-duality scene (neo-Advaita?) There is now a second generation of folks, who now have reservations about *radical* non-duality. They have better psychology backgrounds. They talk about about "spiritual bypassing" and "embodiment" ("integration"?) with lived everyday life. But it seems to be a mixed bag.
Shamil Chandaria does an excellent job of integrating multiple findings from neuroscience with nonduality in his videos. I completely agree that the even some of the former radical nondualists like Tim Freke are much less radical in their message and recognize the importance of dealing with things on the relative level. The radical message of no you here to do anything can be quite harmful to the wrong audience.
We interpret ‘reality’ by our senses and our brain which has been bio psycho socio conditioned. We can strive to understand this underlying schema and thus, to some extent, experience some degree of insight/awareness. Non duality is a poetic construct.
Hey there, thanks for all the videos - absolutely fab and funny to watch too!! I’m really interested in this topic and have watched / consumed heaps of the non-dual gang expounding both sides of the consciousness coin, including Angelo DiLullo, Tony Parsons, Rupert Spira, Ken Wilbur, Ramana, you name it. I was also really curious about the science and philosophy of consciousness before learning about non-duality. Anyhow, I’m wondering if you’d indulge me in your opinions on a couple of questions. Firstly, I guess the non-consciousness message can seem really confronting - and having had various ‘awakened’ experiences (seeing thoughts seperate from self, unbound conscious awareness, samadhi states, non-dual visual perceptions of objects, etc.) - I can see how a recognition of no-self or consciousness could be quite readily available / noticeable. I suppose then a couple of questions arise, such as does the illusion of consciousness provide any benefit to a human being, what is it like to not be conscious (is it like nothing?!), is this non-self something worth pursuing, are experiences experienced in any way at all (albeit not combined into a single ‘stream of consciousness’ - i.e. perhaps the body parts feel sensations but they are not combined into a holistic global view)? I hear analogous ideas often used like the cup appearing as as a cup, or the chair is chairing, or it is seen, or it can be noticed, and it is hard to separate the concept of awareness out of these non-dual accounts of reality. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!! ☺️ Oh, also I’m sure the use of words like I, or recognition, etc. are grammatically incorrect for the circumstance, so please look past those issues unless of course they do have significance in the answer. Again, love the great content and how down to earth it is. ❤
Here it seems there is only one scenario where pronouns can appear to be problematic. That is when attempting to describe This, What Is, All There Is. When communicating through our normal day to day pronouns are normal and necessary.
Thank you! Yes pronouns are not a problem. Charles Bishop below says it perfectly. I'll get back to you with a reply for your other questions at a later stage.
@@nondualityfun awesome, appreciate it! Yeah I get the sense that it’s more like dependant co-arising - i.e. things don’t exist, consciousness doesn’t exist, but when they co-arise you have an ‘appearance’ of a thing not seen from any centre perspective. The chair is the appearance of the universe chairing; seen, but not not seen from any point of view. Ultimately I’d love to pursue this stuff further but don’t love the idea of the lights going out and there just being a human meat robot processing information and performing behavioural responses.
Consciousness is an illusion in that the brain receives and processes lots of thoughts and sensory input, but the sense of a single person having a unified experience of being separate from lots of different objects is illusory. The Cartesian theatre experience of a me sitting in my skull experiencing the world and controlling this body is an illusory model. As an example of how the illusion is created, the brain sees visual input as two flat, upside down images including blood vessels and blind spots at the location of the retinas. It converts those images into an external, continuous, stable, detailed 3d representation that has obvious benefits for survival of the organism. In general the model of a separate self existing in space and time is helpful for survival and for social contexts. If you define consciousness as the process of taking sensory input and creating a self separate from other things in the world, then apart from deep ego death/dissociation experiences the closest we can come to experiencing no consciousness on day to day life is a flow state, like losing yourself in a good movie. Beyond that, there are lots of individual differences in how much the sensory experiences can be deconstructed down to less processed states.
i wondered what you would think of Jason Gregory's YT video from 4/24/24 entitled "The Fundamental Flaw of Neo-Advaita | The Bastardization of Eastern Spirituality"
I had a peek at his video. What Jason Gregory calls neo-advaita I would call satsang (which was something I was heavily involved with). As far as I know neo-advaita is normally also referred to as Radical Non-duality, which is something totally different from satsang. Satsang is the Ramana lineage and yes it's often the practice of 'who am I?' and coming to see yourself as Consciousness with a capital C. Radical Non-duality points to the illusion of consciousness. So . . . not only no consciousness in the human but also no consciousness with a capital C that is hiding somewhere as the Absolute. So unless I am wrong here are the three categories Satsang - awakening to your true self as Satchitananda (includes exercises to reach that state of self realisation of being one with the divine blissful consciousness) Neo-advaita - (I had thought the same as radical non-duality) - no self, no god, no consciousness, no teaching because everything already is 'what is') Advaita-Vedanta - identifying as pure consciousness (includes exercises to rid oneself of all obstacles to become a pure consciousness which is considered to be divine) It seems Jason Gregory is into 'being atma' as the true self. The animated videos on this channel are more aligned with Buddhism of Anatta - no self (but no other aspect of Buddhism than that one statement!) , or what I would term Radical Non-duality - no self and the only illusion that is creating the sense of duality is the illusory sense of consciousness. When that is intuited it is very funny . . . . all that work into trying to be spiritual, be consciousness itself, be anything at all . . . . when all along, consciousness itself was the illusion. Always shining, the whole time, is 'what is' and that miracle is unknown and unknowable with no one separate in the first place . . . and no-one becoming God from that consciousness dropping because there is no god. No-one needing to show up differently in any way because already there is no-one. No-one with consciousness in the first place. So a big difference! Thanks for your question!
@@JackHarrison-x5c The only thing it isn't is awareness . . . not only is there no such thing as awareness it's the illusion of it's presence that divides. The illusion creates an I and other. As to what it is? Energy? Unconditional love? Nothing and Everything? No definitive answer can ever be known . . . . knowing appears in the same instance as everything else without a real knower. And without the illusion of knowing there is no-one to answer. That is the difference. We seek hoping we will find the answer but instead of an answer there is dissolution of the seeker. No one to know what 'what is' is.
@@nondualityfun ''the illusion of its presence divides'' - yeah, because that non-verbal sensation felt and misinterpreted to be 'a Me' or 'An I' (as a non-existent mythological 'binary', 'linear' point of Awareness) isn't actually the inferred 'object' or 'noun' or 'pronoun' (non-existent') its purported to be, but is simply the sum total of all You conceive, 'perceive', and are not i.e. the entirety of the 'objective' inference or interpretation (i.e. the inferred or 'rendered' and downright unqualified imposition/projection of 'space-time' - of imagination and memory, can be 'distilled' to that single arbitrary approximate (sensation) misperceived to be 'I'-Awareness. P.S. ''Whatever can be perceived cannot be perceiving'' - 'Huang Po' (including that 'objectified' sensation - albeit prior to language) As ever, ''What is'' (''Universal Being'' or ''intelligence'', words fail, is nonbinary, nonlinear and noncomputational and is exclusively negentropic - as all thats 'happening'.
Well, since consciousness is the processes of the brain, we can't look to single process things like rocks. We must look towards systems. A business, or city, has a higher change of being a conscious being than a rock. Both business and cities certainly seem to have character that is emerging from its parts, and so a city may just be conscious, similar to how we think we are conscious from the process in our brain. We may see the truth that a city isn't conscious but fail to see our own consciousness as fabricated. Yet we are amazed when neurons move as if they have consciousness themselves, but a city might see it the same way. It may think it's conscious but is amazed when it sees us move about as if we (it's parts) have agency, just like it thinks it has. While a business may be more apparently running itself than a city, both may not have the comparable amount of process to a neocortex and therefore do not experience consciousness after all. But nature certainly seems to have a direction, and plenty of processes, so that might be something. Maybe a bunch of super clusters put together have enough going on as a brain, so maybe that super supercluster thinks it's conscious too.
It's sort of similar to the no self of Buddha. It isn't the traditional advaita non-duality which points to consciousness as one's true self. It is the non-duality which says that duality only seems to be there because of the illusion of consciousness . . . but ultimately there is no duality . . . and no non-duality to seek because it is already the case.
Hi! I love your videos and would love to collab if you're interested! If you ever need some scrappy stop motion drawings for a video I would love to contribute. Let me know!!
No-one is aware of the model . . . but there can be a model that is rich with information and a brain tracking attention about a model in a way that seems like there is awareness of a model. From that point no conclusions can be made. It's not that one is right and one is wrong but there is no-one with actual awareness able to draw a conclusion, and no actual Advaita, and that leaves 'what is'. It's not like there is a person who gets to be right. Just 'what is'. So much more astonishing than a someone with a heap of knowledge about Advaita as if it were a real thing.
@@nondualityfun hey thanks for your response, I really appreciate it! Could I ask… by awareness, do you mean the verbal knowledge “I am aware” as opposed to actually being aware? Do you think of awareness as an interactive process - I am aware of this? What about an awareness where nobody is aware and nothing to be aware of? Just being aware?
@@harryegerton7296 How about awareness as a verb? So . . . .awaring rather than awareness as a noun. In the appearance there is verbing happening. Language probably won't change from "I'm aware of blah blah.' But as you can see from that sentence it immediately creates division. A me who is aware of something . . . suddenly there is a sense of duality . . . and from there comes the whole futile search to find Oneness. The sense of consciousness as a noun is the only thing creating the illusion of duality. This is why it is so ridiculous that there is this whole search for consciousness as one's true self or hoping that Wholeness is awareness itself when it's the divider . . . and it's not even real in the first place. Subtract awareness from this whole game and immediately it is 'what is'. Well . . . it's always 'what is' but in the appearance humans seem to be the only animal thinking it has or is aware and wants that awareness to be divine. It's much simpler. The ability to become aware is the same as the ability to jump. We can jump but we don't have jump in us as a noun. The body can jump, the body can seem to be aware . . . without having awareness. And it's not as if awareness is anything beyond the strongest signals coming from the senses to the brain. There is not an identity in the brain who receives those signals. The brain tracks those signals and the strongest ones win. No identity is involved whatsoever. It's automatic. But humans romanticise awareness as a thing. Meanwhile the miracle is here the whole time . . . as 'what is' . . . . and it doesn't include humans as separate in any way. Does that answer your question?
@@nondualityfun Yes - I see: a noun or a ‘thing’ called awareness is just another thought construct. I agree that it is divisive as you say. The verb aware-ing also resonates, but I don’t feel that it can be attributed to the body, or that it is necessarily dependent upon the appearance of sense perceptions. For that reason, neither a noun or a verb seems to be quite right… I can’t say that it’s a ‘thing’ or a ‘functioning’ or any kind of ‘activity’. But ‘it’ is totally undeniable at the same time. Words really fail here. Every appearance (body, brain, ‘what is’, anything) is less certain than ‘it’. Please let me what you think! Thanks again for your time and sharing. It’s lovely to be able to talk over this with you!
@@harryegerton7296 Yes! . ..No words can do it! And none of it can make sense! And the brain is so inadequate . . . because it appears along with everything else. So not only can we not know because there is no self, there is no vehicle by which to know anything!
What is the difference between non-duality saying there is nothing and science saying there is nothing? Both are appearance. Both are nothing. They happen to say the same thing in this instance. These animations are an art form that is also saying exactly that.
There seems to be an attempt to connect the material with the immaterial and a differentiation of the perceived. However, I am not clear on the various nuances of non-duality teachings and might have missed the point.
"Here I am next to a fence with no me. It's amazing". Hahaha. Great work Clare & crew! Thanks for these videos. They're really on point & funny.
I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be Anna Brown
Great! I have been waiting for your next video. It was superb. Well done!. Just wanted to be the first to comment.
Thanks for the pointer to Michael Graziano’s work. One of the great difficulties in discussing attention/awareness/consciousness/self is that it often seems like everyone has their own definitions, which of course conflict with each other. Graziano says attention is something the brain does; consciousness is something the brain says it has.
The more I look into theories of consciousness, the more I like model-based approaches. It appears that our minds build very simplistic models of reality in order to conserve resources and to increase applicability, i.e., the amount of reality that we have an explanation for. Donald Hoffman has done a lot of research on this approach and how it evolved to maximize a fitness function even at the cost of inaccurate representations of reality.
Bottom line is that humans experience the universe and create a model of a self that is having those experiences. This model of a self is useful for explaining, understanding, and predicting how and why we do things and by extension how other people and societies act. However, it’s this separate self that seems to be in control of our thoughts and bodies and sits in our heads like a small homunculus somewhere behind our eyes that is illusory. It’s merely a construct. Consciousness is frequently defined as what it feels like to be X, for example, what it feels like to be a bat. If we define human consciousness as the experience of being a self, it follows that by that definition consciousness is also illusory.
The more I learn, the more I think that everything we do is driven entirely by our subconscious and consciousness exists only to provide our subconscious with a predictive and introspective model of our own body and actions and how others interact with it. Somehow that model of a self in charge of our body must have provided a reproductive advantage to early hominids. Maybe because they could explain their behavior even if those explanations were completely inaccurate. This viewpoint is also supported by Gazzaniga’s split brain experiments where the left hemisphere of the brain comes up with explanations for what the body is doing even if those explanations are completely wrong. For example, show a message to the right hemisphere asking the person to leave the room and the left hemisphere will explain that the subject suddenly decided to go into the hall and get a soda from the vending machine.
Yes! Enjoyed what you wrote. It is amazing how the left brain makes up stuff . . . seemingly to justify behaviour it has no idea about. The model based self seems to hit the nail on the head. It's not quite non-duality but swings so close. It is incredible how the brain constructs things. It constructs a prediction then constructs an emotion about that prediction then constructs a feeling while at the same time constructing a model that someone is feeling the feeling that the brain just constructed and we go - "This is real!" I'm putting some of that in the next animation. Thanks for watching the video and writing.
@@nondualityfun I’m looking forward to your next video. Gazzaniga’s work is really thought-provoking. I remember one experiment where he asked each hemisphere what it wanted to be and got different answers. One side said draftsman and the other wrote automobile race. So it seems that the feeling of a unified consciousness is another illusion stacked on top of the illusion of the self having a consciousness in the first place. We’re all familiar with having mixed feelings about things, like whether to have dessert. Some days our health-conscious self wins and other days it’s our hedonic self that wins. Maybe Internal Family Systems has it right and our consciousness contains not just a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, but a host of competing selves that are often working at cross purposes.
“For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have many thousand…and these selves of which we are built up, one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own… so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not there… and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Ha! Bought Gazzaniga's book the other day and have only read a couple of chapters so far. I'll keep reading! Thanks@@hansenmarc
So you have other channels? I had no idea. Have you ever taken a nice dose of psilocybin? My experience was a total "realization" that there is Consciousness (big C) and it's impossible to die. This seemed absurdly obvious. Even with this conviction, I still enjoy your channel. You are undeniably very smart and talented.
I've been trying to find the simplest and most concise presentation of the neuroscience perspective. Anil Seth seems to be the clearest presenter. Though this video seems to be targeted to those of us, who have experience in the recent non-duality scene (neo-Advaita?)
There is now a second generation of folks, who now have reservations about *radical* non-duality. They have better psychology backgrounds. They talk about about "spiritual bypassing" and "embodiment" ("integration"?) with lived everyday life. But it seems to be a mixed bag.
Shamil Chandaria does an excellent job of integrating multiple findings from neuroscience with nonduality in his videos.
I completely agree that the even some of the former radical nondualists like Tim Freke are much less radical in their message and recognize the importance of dealing with things on the relative level. The radical message of no you here to do anything can be quite harmful to the wrong audience.
We interpret ‘reality’ by our senses and our brain which has been bio psycho socio conditioned. We can strive to understand this underlying schema and thus, to some extent, experience some degree of insight/awareness.
Non duality is a poetic construct.
Hey there, thanks for all the videos - absolutely fab and funny to watch too!!
I’m really interested in this topic and have watched / consumed heaps of the non-dual gang expounding both sides of the consciousness coin, including Angelo DiLullo, Tony Parsons, Rupert Spira, Ken Wilbur, Ramana, you name it.
I was also really curious about the science and philosophy of consciousness before learning about non-duality.
Anyhow, I’m wondering if you’d indulge me in your opinions on a couple of questions.
Firstly, I guess the non-consciousness message can seem really confronting - and having had various ‘awakened’ experiences (seeing thoughts seperate from self, unbound conscious awareness, samadhi states, non-dual visual perceptions of objects, etc.) - I can see how a recognition of no-self or consciousness could be quite readily available / noticeable.
I suppose then a couple of questions arise, such as does the illusion of consciousness provide any benefit to a human being, what is it like to not be conscious (is it like nothing?!), is this non-self something worth pursuing, are experiences experienced in any way at all (albeit not combined into a single ‘stream of consciousness’ - i.e. perhaps the body parts feel sensations but they are not combined into a holistic global view)?
I hear analogous ideas often used like the cup appearing as as a cup, or the chair is chairing, or it is seen, or it can be noticed, and it is hard to separate the concept of awareness out of these non-dual accounts of reality.
Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!! ☺️
Oh, also I’m sure the use of words like I, or recognition, etc. are grammatically incorrect for the circumstance, so please look past those issues unless of course they do have significance in the answer.
Again, love the great content and how down to earth it is. ❤
Here it seems there is only one scenario where pronouns can appear to be problematic. That is when attempting to describe This, What Is, All There Is. When communicating through our normal day to day pronouns are normal and necessary.
Thank you! Yes pronouns are not a problem. Charles Bishop below says it perfectly. I'll get back to you with a reply for your other questions at a later stage.
@@nondualityfun awesome, appreciate it!
Yeah I get the sense that it’s more like dependant co-arising - i.e. things don’t exist, consciousness doesn’t exist, but when they co-arise you have an ‘appearance’ of a thing not seen from any centre perspective. The chair is the appearance of the universe chairing; seen, but not not seen from any point of view.
Ultimately I’d love to pursue this stuff further but don’t love the idea of the lights going out and there just being a human meat robot processing information and performing behavioural responses.
Consciousness is an illusion in that the brain receives and processes lots of thoughts and sensory input, but the sense of a single person having a unified experience of being separate from lots of different objects is illusory. The Cartesian theatre experience of a me sitting in my skull experiencing the world and controlling this body is an illusory model. As an example of how the illusion is created, the brain sees visual input as two flat, upside down images including blood vessels and blind spots at the location of the retinas. It converts those images into an external, continuous, stable, detailed 3d representation that has obvious benefits for survival of the organism. In general the model of a separate self existing in space and time is helpful for survival and for social contexts.
If you define consciousness as the process of taking sensory input and creating a self separate from other things in the world, then apart from deep ego death/dissociation experiences the closest we can come to experiencing no consciousness on day to day life is a flow state, like losing yourself in a good movie. Beyond that, there are lots of individual differences in how much the sensory experiences can be deconstructed down to less processed states.
i wondered what you would think of Jason Gregory's YT video from 4/24/24 entitled "The Fundamental Flaw of Neo-Advaita | The Bastardization of Eastern Spirituality"
I had a peek at his video. What Jason Gregory calls neo-advaita I would call satsang (which was something I was heavily involved with). As far as I know neo-advaita is normally also referred to as Radical Non-duality, which is something totally different from satsang.
Satsang is the Ramana lineage and yes it's often the practice of 'who am I?' and coming to see yourself as Consciousness with a capital C. Radical Non-duality points to the illusion of consciousness. So . . . not only no consciousness in the human but also no consciousness with a capital C that is hiding somewhere as the Absolute.
So unless I am wrong here are the three categories
Satsang - awakening to your true self as Satchitananda (includes exercises to reach that state of self realisation of being one with the divine blissful consciousness)
Neo-advaita - (I had thought the same as radical non-duality) - no self, no god, no consciousness, no teaching because everything already is 'what is')
Advaita-Vedanta - identifying as pure consciousness (includes exercises to rid oneself of all obstacles to become a pure consciousness which is considered to be divine)
It seems Jason Gregory is into 'being atma' as the true self. The animated videos on this channel are more aligned with Buddhism of Anatta - no self (but no other aspect of Buddhism than that one statement!) , or what I would term Radical Non-duality - no self and the only illusion that is creating the sense of duality is the illusory sense of consciousness. When that is intuited it is very funny . . . . all that work into trying to be spiritual, be consciousness itself, be anything at all . . . . when all along, consciousness itself was the illusion. Always shining, the whole time, is 'what is' and that miracle is unknown and unknowable with no one separate in the first place . . . and no-one becoming God from that consciousness dropping because there is no god. No-one needing to show up differently in any way because already there is no-one. No-one with consciousness in the first place.
So a big difference! Thanks for your question!
@@nondualityfun ''Always shining, the whole time, is 'what is'''
- and what do you suppose is universally ''what is'' if not Awareness? - thanks.
@@JackHarrison-x5c The only thing it isn't is awareness . . . not only is there no such thing as awareness it's the illusion of it's presence that divides. The illusion creates an I and other. As to what it is? Energy? Unconditional love? Nothing and Everything? No definitive answer can ever be known . . . . knowing appears in the same instance as everything else without a real knower. And without the illusion of knowing there is no-one to answer. That is the difference. We seek hoping we will find the answer but instead of an answer there is dissolution of the seeker. No one to know what 'what is' is.
@@nondualityfun ''the illusion of its presence divides'' - yeah, because that non-verbal sensation felt and misinterpreted to be 'a Me' or 'An I' (as a non-existent mythological 'binary', 'linear' point of Awareness) isn't actually the inferred 'object' or 'noun' or 'pronoun' (non-existent') its purported to be, but is simply the sum total of all You conceive, 'perceive', and are not i.e. the entirety of the 'objective' inference or interpretation (i.e. the inferred or 'rendered' and downright unqualified imposition/projection of 'space-time' - of imagination and memory, can be 'distilled' to that single arbitrary approximate (sensation) misperceived to be 'I'-Awareness.
P.S. ''Whatever can be perceived cannot be perceiving'' - 'Huang Po' (including that 'objectified' sensation - albeit prior to language)
As ever, ''What is'' (''Universal Being'' or ''intelligence'', words fail, is nonbinary, nonlinear and noncomputational and is exclusively negentropic - as all thats 'happening'.
Such a joy to experience- thank you 🙏 for another hilarious mind bending rabbit hole of fun 🎉 so inspiring!
Even if we all agree something is real it does not make something true.
this is as insane as the guy who thinks there is a squirrel in his head
Well, since consciousness is the processes of the brain, we can't look to single process things like rocks. We must look towards systems. A business, or city, has a higher change of being a conscious being than a rock. Both business and cities certainly seem to have character that is emerging from its parts, and so a city may just be conscious, similar to how we think we are conscious from the process in our brain. We may see the truth that a city isn't conscious but fail to see our own consciousness as fabricated. Yet we are amazed when neurons move as if they have consciousness themselves, but a city might see it the same way. It may think it's conscious but is amazed when it sees us move about as if we (it's parts) have agency, just like it thinks it has. While a business may be more apparently running itself than a city, both may not have the comparable amount of process to a neocortex and therefore do not experience consciousness after all. But nature certainly seems to have a direction, and plenty of processes, so that might be something. Maybe a bunch of super clusters put together have enough going on as a brain, so maybe that super supercluster thinks it's conscious too.
Those few of us who actually 'get this' ... are not an 'us' at all !!! 😳
I don't think it's deluded. I think it's a dead end. It's mostly conceptual proliferation..
brilliant, well done!
though, consciousness isn't within the brain...the brain is within consciousness.
Thanks. What you're saying is what I used to teach . . . . and not how I would put it now, but thanks!
@@nondualityfun 😳
is this the no-self teaching of the buddha or advaita non-duality or something different?
It's sort of similar to the no self of Buddha. It isn't the traditional advaita non-duality which points to consciousness as one's true self. It is the non-duality which says that duality only seems to be there because of the illusion of consciousness . . . but ultimately there is no duality . . . and no non-duality to seek because it is already the case.
Hi! I love your videos and would love to collab if you're interested! If you ever need some scrappy stop motion drawings for a video I would love to contribute. Let me know!!
Ooh yes . . . .send me a link to some of your work! Go to my site and from there we can swap emails. www.nonduality.fun
All grist for the mill.
How can you claim there is a model of awareness, without being aware of that model?
Materialism is just as much a belief as awareness-ism.
No-one is aware of the model . . . but there can be a model that is rich with information and a brain tracking attention about a model in a way that seems like there is awareness of a model. From that point no conclusions can be made. It's not that one is right and one is wrong but there is no-one with actual awareness able to draw a conclusion, and no actual Advaita, and that leaves 'what is'.
It's not like there is a person who gets to be right. Just 'what is'. So much more astonishing than a someone with a heap of knowledge about Advaita as if it were a real thing.
@@nondualityfun hey thanks for your response, I really appreciate it!
Could I ask… by awareness, do you mean the verbal knowledge “I am aware” as opposed to actually being aware?
Do you think of awareness as an interactive process - I am aware of this?
What about an awareness where nobody is aware and nothing to be aware of? Just being aware?
@@harryegerton7296 How about awareness as a verb? So . . . .awaring rather than awareness as a noun. In the appearance there is verbing happening. Language probably won't change from "I'm aware of blah blah.' But as you can see from that sentence it immediately creates division. A me who is aware of something . . . suddenly there is a sense of duality . . . and from there comes the whole futile search to find Oneness. The sense of consciousness as a noun is the only thing creating the illusion of duality.
This is why it is so ridiculous that there is this whole search for consciousness as one's true self or hoping that Wholeness is awareness itself when it's the divider . . . and it's not even real in the first place.
Subtract awareness from this whole game and immediately it is 'what is'. Well . . . it's always 'what is' but in the appearance humans seem to be the only animal thinking it has or is aware and wants that awareness to be divine. It's much simpler. The ability to become aware is the same as the ability to jump. We can jump but we don't have jump in us as a noun. The body can jump, the body can seem to be aware . . . without having awareness. And it's not as if awareness is anything beyond the strongest signals coming from the senses to the brain. There is not an identity in the brain who receives those signals. The brain tracks those signals and the strongest ones win. No identity is involved whatsoever. It's automatic. But humans romanticise awareness as a thing. Meanwhile the miracle is here the whole time . . . as 'what is' . . . . and it doesn't include humans as separate in any way. Does that answer your question?
@@nondualityfun Yes - I see: a noun or a ‘thing’ called awareness is just another thought construct. I agree that it is divisive as you say.
The verb aware-ing also resonates, but I don’t feel that it can be attributed to the body, or that it is necessarily dependent upon the appearance of sense perceptions.
For that reason, neither a noun or a verb seems to be quite right… I can’t say that it’s a ‘thing’ or a ‘functioning’ or any kind of ‘activity’.
But ‘it’ is totally undeniable at the same time. Words really fail here. Every appearance (body, brain, ‘what is’, anything) is less certain than ‘it’.
Please let me what you think!
Thanks again for your time and sharing. It’s lovely to be able to talk over this with you!
@@harryegerton7296 Yes! . ..No words can do it! And none of it can make sense! And the brain is so inadequate . . . because it appears along with everything else. So not only can we not know because there is no self, there is no vehicle by which to know anything!
Ethereal
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👀😵💫
Yes😂😂
Why do you rely on science? Old science in the sense that it’s materialism.
What is the difference between non-duality saying there is nothing and science saying there is nothing? Both are appearance. Both are nothing. They happen to say the same thing in this instance. These animations are an art form that is also saying exactly that.
There is an aspect to appearance/ knowing/ perception that cannot be conveyed with words. It is immaterial.
@@garyhaywood1361 Yes.
There seems to be an attempt to connect the material with the immaterial and a differentiation of the perceived. However, I am not clear on the various nuances of non-duality teachings and might have missed the point.
Every concept is a delusion