Just What is the Universe, Really?

I think it's useful for people to ask what the universe is. But more as a kind of mental calisthenics than to really answer the question.

Plants stretch towards the sun, but they don't actually need to reach it.

Big questions like this tend to have other smaller questions that are underlying them for the asker. So counselors will always ask, 'What do you hope to learn/gain/find by answering this question' or 'What makes you ask this question?'

On the other hand, by really taking the question seriously and asking it on your own terms, you may come to some new, interesting, and useful insights.

"Hey, Brian! My notion of "is" is very simply the experience of One-ness, Unity, the ground of being, Truth, or whatever we might agree to call the non-dual baseline un-coverable in our practice. I make no claims about "is" beyond that. How "is" manifests phenomenologically and what "is" really means philosophically doesn't really matter much to me

"

Sorry if I gave the impression of putting words in your mouth, that wasn't my intention. All I meant to point out was that the one thing that seems to resist skepticism is the existence of pure being / awareness / "is"-ness itself (or whatever one prefers to call it). Different folks will have different notions about the nature, epistemology, and significance of that bare essence of existence, but there seems to be a common referent at the core.

Of course it has to be that way; we can't share perceptions directly. The next best thing is for one to "package" one's perceptions into an abstract conceptual bundle which can be communicated to another, whereupon the other "unpacks" the acquired concepts into a direct perceptual appreciation of self and world by means of practice: reification.

Accordingly the relationship between philosophy and contemplative practice need not be antagonistic. Indeed, the best practice constitutes a deep synergy between the two.

"This is but one example of how our beliefs (or views) shape our experience. Shift the perspective just a hair, and you're in another world entirely. This is why I both love and hate philosophy."

I find it useful to distinguish between the abstraction and reification of concepts. Abstraction is the business of creating representations and formalisms about the contents of experience that can be thought about, reasoned about, and clearly communicated. Reification is the business of allowing concepts to find direct expression in the way one immediately perceives the self and world at a direct, visceral level.

Accordingly I'd say the acquisition and manipulation of concepts is in the domain of philosophy, whereas the reification of concepts in perception is in the domain of contemplative practice. For instance, the Skeptics of ancient Greece diligently applied the intellectual exercise of skepticism in order to achieve a state of calm mental abiding they called "ataraxia." In other words, they refrained from committing to all but the most minimal beliefs and judgments about the perceived world, and so for them, "in the seen is just the seen, in the heard just the heard, ..." Likewise, to observe the three characteristics with vipassana, one must first acquire the conceptual meaning of the three characteristics and form the view that these characteristics can be found in all sensations. First there is a philosophical abstraction, and then a contemplative reification.

"I think it's useful for people to ask what the universe is. But more as a kind of mental calisthenics than to really answer the question.

Plants stretch towards the sun, but they don't actually need to reach it.

Big questions like this tend to have other smaller questions that are underlying them for the asker. So counselors will always ask, 'What do you hope to learn/gain/find by answering this question' or 'What makes you ask this question?'

On the other hand, by really taking the question seriously and asking it on your own terms, you may come to some new, interesting, and useful insights.


"

Hi Nigel,

How about these smaller questions that are useful insights; no things or empitness, no subject or object, an appearence with no self.
I will move onto the bigger questions when I think of them .

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I want to tell you this is real! The metaphorical plant just reached the sun.

"What's interesting to me is that if we take Kant seriously that one may only know phenomena, than the pre-supposition of noumena is unfounded. What we have are preferences of consciousness and our ideas (which are also phenomena of consciousness) about some hypothetical "out there" where so-called separate objects exist.


This is but one example of how our beliefs (or views) shape our experience. Shift the perspective just a hair, and you're in another world entirely. This is why I both love and hate philosophy.

~Jackson"

very interesting point! this is something I was thinking as well. the 'out there' thing-in-itself is merely a conceptualization, though a very evolved one. .. it is still, like all concepts, severely limited.

I love/hate philosophy as well. If there's one thing I learned from my Philosophy of Mysticism class last semester (and the Professor was a real narcissistic douche so I had to try hard) it was that anyone can argue anything. Philosophy for most is just a shield, it serves the function of creating explanations and theories which one holds to as beliefs.Philosophy must be used as a sword, not a shield. For that purpose, philosophy as a pragmatic tool to cut through beliefs, not create more. This is done by negating beliefs, concepts, and our grasping toward them. This is why I dig Buddhist philosophy so much.. it's whole purpose is a pragmatic approach toward eradicating false conceptualizing, using thoughts to remove the stranglehold of thoughts.. like using dirt to clean away dirt.

(continued from above)

So then, from the perspective of relative truth, there is the possibility of the rope being seen as other than a rope (in this case, a snake), and also the possibility of understanding the rope for what it is at this level - which is merely a rope.

From the perspective of Ultimate Reality, both the rope-as-snake and the rope-as-rope are manifestations of True Self or Mind.

In my humble opinion, I feel we do ourselves a disservice when we make a dualism out of relative and ultimate realities, as if one were right/good and the other wrong/bad. This, to me, is just as pathological as believing day is much better than night, so it would be good to travel in such a way as to be ever under the sun. Such a view would pull one far out of the natural flow of life as it manifests itself without our attempt to intervene. Wouldn't it be better to embrace both?

Thoughts?
~Jackson

Ultimately, the answer to the question "Just what is the Universe, really?" depends on one's perspective - i.e. the level of mind from which the answer is coming from.

Here's an excerpt from Ken Wilber's glorious book, "The Spectrum of Consciousness"...

"We have already seen that man has two major forms of knowing, one being symbolic-map knowledge and the other being non-dual awareness. The Madhyamika calls the former 'samvritti', which is responsible for the relative truths of science and philosophy, while the latter is referred to as paramartha, which results in the knowledge of Absolute Truth. Later systems, such as the Yogacara and Vedanta, elaborated upon this essential two-fold knowledge. In this system, the first or symbolic-map mod of knowing is subdivided into two classes: one class, called 'parikalpita' by the Yogacara, results in pure imaginary knowledge, such as viewing a rope and thinking that it is a snake; the second class, called 'paratantra', is responsible for what we would call objective truth, such as seeing a rope and correctly calling it a rope. Finally, the Madhyamika's 'paramartha': it is what we are calling non-dual awareness 'of' absolute truth. The Yogacara simply re-names it as parinishpanna, and, as we just said, it corresponds with the second mode of knowing and is thus responsible for absolute truth, for seeing the rope and knowing that one is seeing one's own True Self, Mind-only."

(continued below)

I agree, and said so this way in message #13:

"I think relative and absolute are both correct, in context. This makes things hard to grok, yes, but that's the way I see it."

"
I agree, and said so this way in message #13:

"I think relative and absolute are both correct, in context. This makes things hard to grok, yes, but that's the way I see it."

"

Yes, and I appreciate your being able to say so in so few words. Brevity has never been my strong suit.

(ironically enough, this is one of my shorter posts!)

While I may say it in fewer words I say it less accurately!

Hi Jackson,

What you wrote was perfect, so I just continued.

(In my humble opinion, I feel we do ourselves a disservice when we make a dualism out of relative and ultimate realities, as if one were right/good and the other wrong/bad. This, to me, is just as pathological as believing day is much better than night, so it would be good to travel in such a way as to be ever under the sun. Such a view would pull one far out of the natural flow of life as it manifests itself without our attempt to intervene. It is better to embrace both, then both disolve. Oh! Just an appearance, there can be no intervention for ALL is a manifestation, without effort.

""I think relative and absolute are both correct, in context. This makes things hard to grok, yes, but that's the way I see it."

While I may say it in fewer words!

"

Hi Chris,

It looks like I ignored you, I didn't. (I nodd my head in agreement)

Gary, that's nice of you to say, but it's okay. Really.

I woke up this morning to my phone ringing ( I have Indian music as a ring tone), being lazy I decided not to answer and that I would pickup on the message later. After listening to the ringing for a while it occurred to me the phone cannot ring for this length of time at which time I concluded the sound was a hallucination. I stayed with the hallucination a few minutes then decided to shift my attention at which the ringing went.

I thought this whole episode illustrates well much of what is being said in this thread. Where there was only an appearance of sound and a whole "real" reality arose, and the original sound is no different from that which it sprouted except that mind stream that caused it was not conscious. With the appearance of the sound "I" was real, the phone was real, its ringing was real, the sound was real as each aspect put in an appearance. Then "I" was real, concluding the hallucination was real, "I" was real, the hallucination was real as these aspects too come and go. Only appearing real, not real due to any quality of an external object.

"Hi Nigel,

How about these smaller questions that are useful insights; no things or empitness, no subject or object, an appearence with no self.
I will move onto the bigger questions when I think of them .

Sorry for the sarcasm, but I want to tell you this is real! The metaphorical plant just reached the sun.

"

I would not have picked up on any sarcasm if you hadn't told me. I still don't quite see it actually. hahaha.

I made my comment in the context of the 'Unanswerable Questions' discussed in some Buddhist contexts. There were a number of questions to which, it is maintained, the Buddha would only reply with silence.

Here's an overview:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions

As the Wikipedia sutta says, they fall into four categories:

Regarding 1) the existence of the world in time; 2) the existence of the world in space; 3) life after death; 4) the nature of personal experience

www.buddhanet.net/budsas/ebud/majjhima/0...alunkhyaputta-e1.htm

There's the sutta. To sum it up briefly, the Buddha says, 'Dude. Don't worry about it!'

That's the context.

My view is that it can still be useful to consider questions like these as a way of stretching, limbering, or sometimes tiring out the discursive intellect. They work sort of like chew toys. I think it depends on the person and the circumstances.

In the final analysis, asking questions like, 'what is the smell of freedom' or 'What are the exact physical dimensions of yearning' can only ever be exercises. That's because the tool being used (discursive intellect with the other senses) is not suited to the task.

But I think that, in chewing on questions like these, people wind up finding or creating all kinds of useful things. Like vaccines, traffic lights, and post-it notes.

"I would not have picked up on any sarcasm if you hadn't told me. I still don't quite see it actually. hahaha.

There's the sutta. To sum it up briefly, the Buddha says, 'Dude. Don't worry about it!'
"

Yes; some questions are not beneficial and it seemed to me you had put the question presented here on the nature of consciousness into this category. A question only good for mental exercise and "small" questions. So I have sarcastically listed big questions as small.

Realising that consciousness has no part with anything "external" but is an appearance cascaded to

1 - emptiness including the emptiness of emptiness because there were no things.
2 - both subject and object are an appearance and the appearance neither is nor is not the subject / object ( therefore an illusion).
3 - Self in all various forms are appearances and again they neither are nor are not the appearance ( an illusion).
4 - "realness" is not of an object. Objects have nothing in and of themselves, they are appearances!

This all came like Wham! I must have had one hell of a grin, nothing like the category of post-it notes .

"Yes; some questions are not beneficial and it seemed to me you had put the question presented here on the nature of consciousness into this category. A question only good for mental exercise and "small" questions. So I have sarcastically listed big questions as small."

Ah, I see. No, I was not putting the nature of consciousness into that category. I was responding to the original question: 'What is the Universe, Really?'

The insights you describe are the Buddhadharma. And I am very, very happy that you are soaking in it. That's my plan as well.

But, to clarify, those unaswerable questions should not be considered 'not beneficial'. It's because of working on those questions, for example, that we have microchips, microprocessors, and this Kenneth Folk Dharma community. Not to mention one of my own favorites: multi-vitamins.

There truly is value in working with the unanswerables. What's not beneficial is to conflate them with buddhadharma.

On the other hand, paradoxically, working with them can lead one to buddhadharma all the same.

I like to see those questions, and the impulses that drive their asking, respected as well.