The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Londoner
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

Post by Londoner »

Dontaskme wrote:One may know one is going to die, but no one knows one is dead.

You have no way of knowing you are alive. You were not there at your birth.
I was at my birth in that my body did not spring into existence from nothing; before that particular event I existed as a fetus.

Some changes took place during my birth, so my state as a baby was different to my state as a fetus, but all change did not stop then. As an adult I am different to how I was as a baby, when I woke up this morning I was different to how I was last night. As you write yourself in a later post:
Man is conscious of the aliveness (action, word or thought) of the moment with certainty, only after it happens and never before it happens. Man can never premeditate the aliveness of the moment with certainty. Each moment is passing away, dying into this eternal stillness that is going nowhere.
So I don't see why you pick out birth as being particularly significant.

I also think it is a mistake to think of time as a series of 'moments', popping into existence and then going into a dustbin called 'eternal stillness'.

We use time as a tool for ordering sensations. If we really only had 'the moment' then we could not be conscious, since we could never differentiate ourselves from any current sensation. I cannot think 'hot now!' unless I can think 'was cold'. We need to be able to think 'this is new relative to me' which means I must have the idea of the past in order to have the idea of the present, they are not separate things.

We know that this notion of time is only subjective, that my own memory of 'childhood' is not some sort of an object in the universe, that has fixed attributes or is accessible to others. (Our ideas of 'time' in physics is different.) We do not think it 'exists' now, let alone after we are dead. So I'm not clear what you are telling us.
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Dontaskme
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Londoner wrote:
Dontaskme wrote:One may know one is going to die, but no one knows one is dead.

You have no way of knowing you are alive. You were not there at your birth.
I was at my birth in that my body did not spring into existence from nothing; before that particular event I existed as a fetus.

Some changes took place during my birth, so my state as a baby was different to my state as a fetus, but all change did not stop then. As an adult I am different to how I was as a baby, when I woke up this morning I was different to how I was last night. As you write yourself in a later post:
Man is conscious of the aliveness (action, word or thought) of the moment with certainty, only after it happens and never before it happens. Man can never premeditate the aliveness of the moment with certainty. Each moment is passing away, dying into this eternal stillness that is going nowhere.
So I don't see why you pick out birth as being particularly significant.

I also think it is a mistake to think of time as a series of 'moments', popping into existence and then going into a dustbin called 'eternal stillness'.

We use time as a tool for ordering sensations. If we really only had 'the moment' then we could not be conscious, since we could never differentiate ourselves from any current sensation. I cannot think 'hot now!' unless I can think 'was cold'. We need to be able to think 'this is new relative to me' which means I must have the idea of the past in order to have the idea of the present, they are not separate things.

We know that this notion of time is only subjective, that my own memory of 'childhood' is not some sort of an object in the universe, that has fixed attributes or is accessible to others. (Our ideas of 'time' in physics is different.) We do not think it 'exists' now, let alone after we are dead. So I'm not clear what you are telling us.
The mind understands that life is made up of moments, one moment following the other in succession. The duration of numerical time within a moment and the duration which divides one moment from the next, however is not known. This implies that a moment in life is eternal and neither one, two or many.

Nothing is born. Nothing dies. Nothing is conscious.

All just illusory concepts/ideas/beliefs appearing and disappearing without a trace.

If you can find an I ...show me it?

If you can find a self ...show me that?

If you can find a thought...show me, hold it up in front of you?

This is NO THING being EVERYTHING...


Man understands that it is obvious that only one thing can happen in a moment and neither two nor many. Man also understands that time is needed for anything to happen, and as time duration is not known within a moment, it signifies that not even a single thing could happen in a moment. This signifies that only movement in an eternal moment appears as one two or many movements within a moment.

The deep understanding that the moment in life is eternal without numerical time reveals that advaita or life as it is, is what it is. And as every moment of life is energy or light, what is as it is in every moment has to be an illusion of light.
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Dontaskme
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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uwot wrote:
Dontaskme wrote:Can the experiencer be separated from the experience?
I don't know. This goes back to the Islamic philosopher Avicenna's argument of the flying man, revamped and incorporated into western philosophy by Descartes' Cogito. Both Avicenna and Descartes argued that the experiencer and the experience are fundamentally separate things, they were mind or soul/body dualists.
Dontaskme wrote:Knowledge informs illusory reality.
Knowledge of what? Certainly perception informs of reality, and our human perceptions are contingent; so while a fire engine appears red because that is this sensation stimulated by particular wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, it doesn't follow that the fire engine is illusory. Maybe it is, but the experience is real.
No one has ever seen the colour red or a fire engine. That which is seen is that which is looking and that which is looking can never be seen, only known. What knows the known is unkowable. Reality is an illusion appearing real as experienced. But the experiencer and the experience are eternally one and the same in the moment...experiencing itself.
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Dontaskme
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Greta wrote: Incoherent. Meaningless.
That's about the gist of it.
Londoner
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Dontaskme wrote: The mind understands that life is made up of moments, one moment following the other in succession. The duration of numerical time within a moment and the duration which divides one moment from the next, however is not known. This implies that a moment in life is eternal and neither one, two or many.
I do not think that is true.

Life is made up of events, to say an event occupied 'a moment' would just be to say 'it was quick', that it was immediately followed by another event. If we wanted to give a more objective description we would compare its duration to something everyone had access to, like the movement of the hands of a clock, and say 'it took three seconds' or whatever.
Nothing is born. Nothing dies. Nothing is conscious.

All just illusory concepts/ideas/beliefs appearing and disappearing without a trace.
I do not think that is true either. What happens to humans involves both continuity and change. I wonder here if you are invoking a version of Zeno's paradox of the arrow, to say that we cannot both be in a particular state but also changing. That would go with the idea of time being a series of 'moments', like frames of a film, each frame being an event (like being born). If so, I can only refer you to the answers offered to this apparent paradox, which personally I find convincing.
If you can find an I ...show me it?

If you can find a self ...show me that?

If you can find a thought...show me, hold it up in front of you?
I would respond that 'I' is a sign used in sentences to indicate the subject, like 'my' or 'she' or 'self' or 'it'. In context we might understand it as shorthand for 'my body' - it isn't a claim about some metaphysical entity. If I say 'it is a stone' I'm not saying there are two things, the 'it' and the 'stone'.

The reason I cannot hold up a thought for you to inspect is that thoughts are a personal experience. I cannot know that you have thoughts, but I am certain I have them. I convey my own thoughts by signs, which are accessible to others, and from the way others respond I find it useful to work on the theory that they too have thoughts, although I cannot know this for sure.
This is NO THING being EVERYTHING...
I agree. 'Everything' is not the name of any particular thing.
Man understands that it is obvious that only one thing can happen in a moment and neither two nor many. Man also understands that time is needed for anything to happen, and as time duration is not known within a moment, it signifies that not even a single thing could happen in a moment. This signifies that only movement in an eternal moment appears as one two or many movements within a moment.
Again, I do not recognise this. When I identify one thing as happening, I do not think that must be the only thing that is happening. And again, I do not think this idea of time as if it existed like frames in a film, into each frame of which we must insert one single event in order for it to happen, is helpful.

Time is a measurement. We have a standard of duration, then compare events to that standard. It isn't a thing in itself. We would not have this problem with length; we do not imagine length as a succession of independently existing millimetres, which objects must acquire in order to be 'long', and that a particular millimetre can only go with one particular object, after which that millmetre vanishes into the void.
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Dontaskme
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Londoner wrote: When I identify one thing as happening, I do not think that must be the only thing that is happening. And again, I do not think this idea of time as if it existed like frames in a film, into each frame of which we must insert one single event in order for it to happen, is helpful.
Man knows only through words that a real action, word or thought has actually happened, only after it happens and never before it actually happens. Man knows as thoughts what he can do, speak or think, but does not know through thoughts the precise moment or the precise action that he will do, speak or think.
Londoner wrote: The reason I cannot hold up a thought for you to inspect is that thoughts are a personal experience.
There is no personal I to experience thought, that idea in an illusion.
Man comes to know through thoughts after the action, word or thought happens. This implies that man is not the doer, speaker or thinker, though they do happen, albeit illusory.
Londoner
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

Post by Londoner »

Dontaskme wrote: Man knows only through words that a real action, word or thought has actually happened, only after it happens and never before it actually happens. Man knows as thoughts what he can do, speak or think, but does not know through thoughts the precise moment or the precise action that he will do, speak or think.
You would need to explain what the significance of the words 'real' and 'precise' in that. Also to say that 'man knows as thoughts' seems to suggest that man can be separate from his thoughts, that he can 'think about his thoughts' by some other method than thinking.

And, as I remarked in my previous post, I think it makes problems if we think of a 'moment' as if it was a thing in itself.
Londoner wrote: Me: The reason I cannot hold up a thought for you to inspect is that thoughts are a personal experience.

There is no personal I to experience thought, that idea in an illusion.
Indeed, that is the problem I point out above; except I would not say it is an 'illusion' since that suggests that there was the possibility of being separate from our thoughts, if we could only 'see' clearly.

Rather I would say that the problem is again something I pointed out previously, that we are trying to treat our being separately from what our being consists of. We are back to saying 'this is a rock' and 'the rock is being a rock' as if they were two separate things. 'I' cannot experience my thought because 'I' already signifies an experiencing entity.
Man comes to know through thoughts after the action, word or thought happens. This implies that man is not the doer, speaker or thinker, though they do happen, albeit illusory.
I do not think we imagine that our knowledge of the world is the same thing as the world. To claim knowledge is to say we know something in particular. But to pick on some particular aspect of the world is to misrepresent it; to say 'I know that rock is hard' is to draw an artificial distinction between rocks and everything else, and between rocks, just based on one characteristic. We know we could pick another; 'I know that rock is red', and another, and never exhaust the possibilities. So we understand our knowledge is something we create by thinking, by imposing a structure of our own creation.

But that doesn't make our knowledge an illusion, because without imposing a structure then there is nothing to know. An event is simply what it is, it has no meaning, it conveys no information, indeed it isn't even 'an' event because if we say that we would already be applying some criteria which separated it from the rest of the world.

I think this conversation amounts to you pointing out in various ways that we can only experience the world subjectively, meaning we can never grasp the world as it might be in itself. I think this is quite true, but consequently we can never express it. I think a number of philosophers have got to that point, yet they can never bring themselves to follow their own argument and just stop talking! Instead, they try to express the unsay-able through mystical imagery that obscures rather than clarifies, or they turn it into God.
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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Londoner wrote:
I think this conversation amounts to you pointing out in various ways that we can only experience the world subjectively, meaning we can never grasp the world as it might be in itself. I think this is quite true, but consequently we can never express it.
Thanks Londoner. I really liked all your replies - Thank you I agree with my own point. But knowledge is still an illusion, simply because of the causeless cause dilemma. Was just using the word 'man knows' as a subjective reference point, it was never mans knowing.

I think it can be expressed and should be encouraged as well, and why not if that's just another creative appearance of what is, also it might even reverse the obvious fall into this ever spiralling apparent decadence seen in the world today ...albeit illusory.

Knowledge is of my opinion only and not of the one who brought me here. For the one who brought me here doesn't have an opinion on anything. In other words a lie told often enough becomes the truth.

'' Hasn't knowledge only crippled me from seeing truth? Is knowledge itself illusory? '' JKrishnamurti
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

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GreatandWiseTrixie
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Re: The reason why knowledge is illusory.

Post by GreatandWiseTrixie »

Dontaskme wrote: Wed Jan 11, 2017 8:09 pm You have no way of knowing you are alive. You were not there at your birth.
Non sequitur.
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