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Oneness?? A step fowards or backwards??

punktuality

punktuality

Bluelighter
Joined
May 12, 2003
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Canberra, Australia
I have been reading a book which has got me thinking:

The Death of Forever
A New Future for Human Consciousness
- Darryl Reanney

The book goes over many topics covering everything from quantum physics to biology to spirituality in trying to make sense of the human condition. The book explains a common point which I am sure many of you understand.... what separates us from other animals is our ability to perceive ourselves...and more importantly the ability to perceive ourselves perceiving!

The book looks at some animal behavior and looks at pre-"I" human behavior which can still be witnessed in many tribal cultures, he gives the example of the Australian Aboriginal people:
Hence Aborigines were never isolated; they saw themselves as acting with others, and the bonds of kinship were extended outward embracing the nonhuman and nonempirical world
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So ancient/tribal man was not aware of himself as we are now aware of ourselves, he felt one with nature and the cosmos....

One with nature? Gee, that sounds familiar...it sounds quite like the call of every tripper, guru and hippie around. Indeed it is a fundamental part of what we imagine the quest for enlightenment to entail. No?

So at some point in our past man had already achieved (or evolved to) this state and as the book explains we evolved beyond that to recognise "ourseves":
Instead of being aided primarily by instinctive responses to external stimuli and by mimicry of the forms of a stable social tradition, the individual was now increasingly dominated and controlled at moments of decision by the special forms of his own thought processes. This dominance of the individual's own thought process means, in unitary thought, that his attention was drawn to these processes... Thus man became (ego)-self conscious. The individual became aware of his own thought.
Click to expand...

So my question is I guess, is our search for enlightenment and wish to become one with the universe etc etc nothing more than a step backwards in evolution, not forwards as many might claim? To loose sight of the self is to deny a key step in our evolutionary process. Is the feeling of oneness achieved by psychadelics or meditation a step forward or backwards for human conciousness???
 
in my opinion its a step forwards because it allows you to see clearly without all the bias of the ego. you can still make use of the ego structure after realizing its an illusion.
 
Forward.
While we may be reverting back to a state in which we were in as a species previously, now we are not only aware of it, but we are controlling/influencing it.
 
I just remembered another enlightenment/evolution paradox I was thinking about.... symbols.

Our human intellectual development has been pushed allong by our minds ability to simplify and symbolise the world. The words I use right now are symbols for thoughts that we can use to communicate. the speed at which we can think is hugely influenced by our ability to symbolize. We dont see things as they are, we simplify the information to a more usefull managable form....ie: we symbolise!

Yet many enlightenment texts/techniques/ideas are based on the removal of this process in order to "see the world as it is"

Again a problem that the very thing we seek to remove was (and still is) crucial to our evolution. Backwards or forwards?

There are probably many more paradox' like this that reinforce the idea that our concept of enlightment may infact be a point we have allready reached and gone beyond. Perhaps our quest for enlightenment is a longing for a time gone by? Perhaps it is a result of not completely understanding what and who we are now?

I would like to believe myself that we are going forwards but from un unbiased look at the information about our evolution and progression as a species you cannot deny that it appears as if we are going backwards and aiming for a place that we have allready been to.
 
Simplification and Symbolisation breeds misconception by filtering the information you receive. By using the same filters again and again (over long periods of time), it's easy to lose track (if you ever had it to begin with) of your environment and/or mistake the (imagined) filter as your environment.

I see the concept of enlightenment as I see the concept of perfection. Which is that striving to reach it (even though it's impossible) is being in it. It's this that can propel evolution to move ever more forward (wherever it leads).

For all to reach enlightenement is to be as destructive as you can get. It would end all life as we know it by ending suffering. And there is no life (as we know it) without suffering.
 
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we're logically and mentally moving forward at a very rapid rate.

however, emotionally and 'spiritually' we're devolving.

humans are evolving to become more and more efficient. i wouldn't be surprised if emotion is removed from certain people to increase productivity.

oneness is a step forward in spiritual understanding. however, it's a step backward in the world we live in today, as humans are becoming very efficient machines to accomplish very complex tasks.
 
But if that is the case the surely an animal has a greater sense of true reality than we do as they are not filtering and symbolising the world to the same extent that we do?

Is enlightenment really to become the same as an animal?

While I can appreciate and have experience with how loss of this filter system can be beneficial to our world perception it really does seem to be a paradox in that to go forwards we have to go backwards. One step forward, two steps back?
 
This also raises the question of whether being true to our baser instincts is moving closer to enlightenment, or should we be ridding ourselves of them as many of the spiritual paths suggest.

Been thinking about this one for a while - thanks for increasing the confusion punktuality ;)
 
quiet roar said:
... or should we be ridding ourselves of them as many of the spiritual paths suggest.
Click to expand...

I would've thought that a heightened spirituality would involve more of a co-existence of intellect and emotions rather than either dominating the other.
 
The point of spiritual progression is not to remove our use of symbols. The point is to remove the confusion between symbols and what they represent. To use a common metaphor for life: you would progress towards Tao, not Yin, not Yang.
 
I dunno...
Uhm.

I think it's quite possible to be in an ego-less state but still retain all the power of a human.

Ego-less doesn't mean running around in the woods, eating bugs...
 
Perhaps our quest for enlightenment is a longing for a time gone by?

The idea of a 'fall' from Eden certainly agrees with your statement. It was there, of course, where Adam first named the world, before joining it in estrangement from God. The midrash interpretation sometimes suggests that the separation from the unity of Eden is reflected in each and every individual's struggle to know God. And the grand, comic arc of both Judaism and Christianity concludes in messianic fulfillment. Will there be words in heaven or just ecstatic presence of being? The archetypes of Hinduism are pure light.

Certainly what separates us from the other animals, (this along with our great tools, fire and the wheel), is our capacity to name, or as anthropologists have theorized, we humans posses an 'open call' system, meaning that our language can incorporate greater complexity of meaning, and infinite variations of meaning ... where a beast can only cry 'danger' or 'food.'

Are they, the beasts, in the superior position? They seem to be more at home in the world. Their law is in their DNA where ours is in language.

The poet, Paul Valéry says, “To look is to forget the name of the things you are seeing.” ... to see and forget the names, to see the wind blow the grass and not say 'wind' and not say 'grass,' and not say 'blow' but to be the wind.
 
perhaps one needs to occassionally lose everything to know what one has had or can have

heheh life... rock bottom;)
 
Whether you need to go forward or backwards in your ego to reach enlightment, it is the ultimate goal of humanity. I doubt well create a paradise on this rock within our current state. If we were truly created in the image of God, then it could only be our spiritual aspects that are in Gods image. God aint a physical being after all. Anyway, the state of enlightment isnt about forming a new vocabulary with the word "man" at the end of every sentence, or about reading new concepts but rather its about experiencing different states. You only know oneness for instance by the experience of it, and not by reading what everyone writes abuot it.
 
to reach enlightment, it is the ultimate goal of humanity
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is it really?
As a colective conciousness I would say we are heading in the opposite direction at the moment. goals are subjective, not collective but if we look at the group more people seem self destructive and non-aware than are heading towards enlightenment.

In a Taoist approach, one cannot know enlightenment without first knowing disorder and chaos.

We cannot have a goal that we will reach and then be unable to define because we know of nothing else. It doesnt work like that.

All that exists is change....enlightenment it would seem is a place beyond "change" Perhaps a place we came from before life and conciousness and perhaps even time itself. So yes....perhaps we have allready been to this place we seek.....but that is ok because it is all cyclic.
 
punktuality said:

In a Taoist approach, one cannot know enlightenment without first knowing disorder and chaos.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's what I meant. I think that perhaps to really appreciate and see enlightenment for all the good it is (may be) one must lose it completely, and then evolve through hard lives (as contrast) and slowly evolving to consious being who eventually begin to remember our nature state as whole, which then directs us back to the one state which after all the lifetimes of our world merge to become.
How does one appreciate life when immortal? Experience in limited life spans.


Maybe we're all voices in the head of the universe.

"If i had a tumor, I'd name it Jupiter."
[/end stupid joke]
 
Universal oneness is a 'step back' in regards to the fact that you lose your individual identity..
a step forwards in the respect that you liberate yourself from material/wordly miseries.
 
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