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Quote from: Me_Be on March 16, 2024, 10:48:56 AMThe Bible is belief.Details matter, especially when there is quite as much devil in them as here. (The reason I am nitpicking is to avoid using chosen language as the deciding factor in definitionally-dependent contexts. Is "orange" a fruit or a colour? Is a vertebrate a bird? So forth. Avoiding linguistic ambiguity is a good starting point when trying to describe reality, which does not depend on the words you call it at all. Your models of it, however, may.)
God is belief.
Christianity is belief.
Nonduality is belief.
QuoteThere is no such thing as Nonduality because Nonduality is not a thing.This is a trick of linguistics. It would be like saying "There is no God because God is not a thing." It's... Lazy, somehow. Circular.
QuoteThe Oneness that is reality is not a concept. Duality and multiplicity are concepts, hence the paradox/contradiction of this NON-DUAL multiplicity.Reality is a collection of interconnected systems. The practical degree of said interconnection, however, may vary. For example, due to wave-like nature of particles, an electron "almost certain" to be here *point* may upon resolution be in Andromeda. Let us assume that that electron is a part of my toenail. Does that mean that my toenail is connected to Andromeda? Practically speaking, no, it does not.
The reality is that there is no separation or otherness. There's simply everything¬hing one without a second.
QuoteThe misunderstanding of the word ''Nonduality'' often invokes the feeling of confusion within the thinker, especially how it then attempts to express the idea's ultimate meaning, using concepts. Misunderstandings form a kind of unavoidable ignorance; as Oneness is never recognised, because it's unknown.Deliberately-confusing language may contribute to misunderstanding the proposition. It really is not complicated and while it may have some, shaky though it may be, intellectual scaffolding to lean on, it quite simply gives the individual sensor data analysis far too much credit. So someone born blind does not know what blue looks like. Well, so-effing-what? They can still understand what blue means in the broader context. It's energetic photons at certain wavelengths, hitting the retinae of the eyes and those interactions are being processed as "blue." So, does blue exist even if you cannot conventionally sense it? Of course, it does! It refers to photons of certain energy, which are trivially demonstrable to exist.
Only the conceptual world is known, and in and of itself knows nothing. That's the paradox of Nonduality which is pointing to the nonconceptual using concepts. But, behind the message of every belief lies the pure clarity of reality, the absolute truth.
QuoteI personally think it's useful in the sense of thinking for oneself, and having the capacity to not believe something just because it's what everyone else believes too, so it must be true. We can listen to other people's personal takes on knowledge and belief, and then make up our own mind as to whether we perceive it that way too, or not.Mmmh... Yeah... There are no good reasons to believe anything. There may, however, be sufficient reasons to accept something as true until proven otherwise.
QuoteThe more deeply we think about Nonduality, the closer we come to the realisation of the true nature of reality, eventually arriving at a conclusion that all ''religious beliefs'' are simply analogous to the multiple characters and images seen in our nightly dreams.An advice more than thoughts. You are unliekly to arrive at the "true nature of reality," whatever that expression means to you, in any meaningful way by thinking about nonduality. That just churns and re-churns your pre-existing datasets in search of new conclusions. Get a few more measurements, compare against conflicting datasets and add to your own. Your mind is an open system - treat it as such.
Thoughts...
QuoteBy a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data... I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online — particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected...
There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now...
A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.