AlexW wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 7:47 am
What is a shared border? Can you please give me an example.
The white cup, blue pen, and brown desk is a good example by having a shared border that is the air/space between them. We can't have shape without color and we can't have color without shape. Yin cannot be yin unless yang is yang and there exists a border between them. Difference is identity and identity is difference. Existence cannot happen without borders because existence is relationship.
There can't be a yolk without a border being shared with the albumen and there can't be an egg/environment relationship without the shared border that is the shell.
It would have been easier if you had listened to the Alan Watts video I posted a few days ago that already explained all this rather than making me rehash it.
This is how I see it:
A white cup as well as a blue pen rest on a brown desk. Take away the things-ness that thought adds to seeing and there is only white-brown-blue. Now there seem to be borders between these colours - the border is defined by a different color, but if you go one step deeper into direct experience you find that color is actually nothing else but seeing. Color = Seeing. The border that seemed to be present before you departed from the labels "white-brown-blue" is now gone as all three colours merge into seeing. As the objects, its colours, are made of seeing they are inseparable - seeing can not separate seeing. Of course thought dissects seeing into colours and further on into objects - now you have made seeing into objects, but in reality there is only seeing. You will find that borders can only be found in thought, never in your direct experience.
Yes, that's Buddhism: how to leave existence and venture into the world of nonexistence by merging everything together into a blob of no-thing or the void. I'd sit in a treestand while staring at the forest trying to meditate myself into union with everything else only to find that sucks and therefore the reason everything exists is to escape precisely that state of void.
Blyth had the same revelation, apparently. Alan struggled with it until it dawned on him that difference is identity and existence is relationship.
If you want to exist, there has to be a you and a not-you.
Serendipper wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 4:55 am
That is why I say buddhism is the religion of death because getting out of my mind is ceasing to exist
No. As the "separate you" exists only as an idea/belief all that happens is that the belief is seen as illusory - nothing dies because of that.
So the idea that we exist therefore dies because it's realized that we don't exist. I don't see a significant distinction.
You won't cease to exist just because you realise that this ego-self, that you believe is you, is actually not more than a bundle of misguided thought.
Realization of oneness with everything is the cessation of existence. Like Alan says, if you can't achieve it in this life, don't worry, it will happen automatically upon death when you are gone and there is nothing left but everything else, of which you are a part.
Serendipper wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 4:55 am
I have abandoned Satori altogether and I'm trying to become as deeply attached as I can to as many people and things as possible.
Good idea as long as you don't define yourself via these dependencies and rather see them as the enjoyment that life offers.
Agree: Chasing special states is nonsense.
But that's what you're asking me to do with these exercises with cups.
Serendipper wrote: ↑Wed May 02, 2018 4:55 am
I'm on board with the concept that there are no separate things within the universe, but if that one thing, the universe, is the only thing, then how can it exist?
It's not a thing. If you try to apply the concept of "existence", that you normally use to define things, to the
universe (or rather the absolute, infinite etc) then you will find this to be impossible (or rather very confusing). Existence is for duality. The non-dual is beyond existence (and non-existence).
Again I ask, why not Jehovah, Zeus, Easter Bunny? Everything you've said there is based on preference of belief without possible substantiation as the very means of substantiating anything is undermined by the premise.
Assertion:
It's not a thing.
Proof:
you will find this to be impossible (or rather very confusing). Existence is for duality. The non-dual is beyond existence (and non-existence)
Your substantiation is simply more assertions. That is religion.
So then you'll say that proof by non-real logic isn't possible and that I should simply look at a cup until I see that everything is one, which is an exercise in chasing a special state of existence that you just said is nonsense.
The paradox is this: If A observes B and B observes A, then A and B exist. If A and B are secretly the same, then how can the origin of attention also be the focal point? How can a gun shoot down its own barrel? Therefore A and B cannot be the same. But if A and B are not secretly the same, then how does one thing affect another thing? How does one universe communicate with another? Therefore A and B must be the same. How can A and B be the same and also not the same?