Tag: cosmology

Using Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) as a pointer for what’s here

moe Leave a comment

I listened to an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Long, a Near-Death Experience (NDE) researcher. And although the topic is familiar to me, it was a reminder that the NDEs are all pointing to what’s already here.

Any story, and any cosmology, is pointing to what’s already here in our experience.

What are some common features of NDEs? And what do I find if I use them as pointers for what’s here?

ALL AS THE DIVINE

A common experience in NDEs is of all as the divine, and beyond what we can easily put words on.

It may seem very different from our daily life experience, but we can find the essence of it here and now and bring the noticing to life and allow it to transform us.

In a conventional sense, we are this human self. That’s not wrong.

And yet, is it what we most fundamentally are in our own first-person experience? What do we find when we look a little closer?

We may find we are capacity for the world as it appears to us, and what all our experiences happen within and as. We can make this noticing into a habit and explore how to live from it. And we can allow this to transform our perception, life, and human self in the world.

The easiest approach to finding this may be through some simple structured inquiries, guided by someone familiar with the terrain and guiding others. Personally, I find the Big Mind process and Headless experiments most effective here.

LOVE, PEACE, HOME, ACCEPTANCE

Most report a sense of infinite love, of profoundly coming home, a deep peace, and a deep acceptance.

When we find ourselves as capacity for the world as it appears to us, and what all our experiences happen within and as, we find these as characteristics of what we are and this noticing.

All our experiences happen within our sense fields, and they are part of a seamless whole. Noticing this oneness invites a love independent of feelings and states. Since this is what we more fundamentally are and always have been, there is a profound sense of finding home. And there is also an inherent acceptance in this since it already allows and takes the form of whatever is here.

NO BODY / SINGLE EYE

People with NDEs often report panoramic vision, a vision free from depending on the two eyeballs, and generally sensing free from physical sense organs.

When we find that all our experiences are happening within our sense fields, we may also find that it’s all happening within and as what we are. Here, we notice that all our experiences are happening within our seamless field of experience. In a conventional sense, we still see with eyes, hear with ears, and so on. But in our direct experience, it’s all much more immediate.

The thought that we see through the eyes, hear through the ears, sense with the skin, and so on, is still correct in a conventional sense. But it becomes peripheral and the more immediate experience and noticing of what’s here in the sense fields take center stage.

LIFE REVIEW

Some report a kind of life review. They get to see a series of instances from their life and the impact their actions had on themselves and others.

Our mind always seeks to process unprocessed material and experiences. It brings it up in daily life and dreams. Often not as explicit memory, but in the form of contractions and reactivity. We may not even notice it, or we notice just a feeling or discomfort without recognizing what’s behind it. And often, the resolution and healing process doesn’t go further unless we actively engage with it and allow and invite deeper and more thorough processing.

In this sense, the life review is ongoing. And we can engage with it more intentionally through therapy, inquiry, and so on.

HELLISH EXPERIENCES

A few who experience NDEs report a kind of hellish experience. It may be turmoil, despair, confusion, anger, struggle, and so on.

This too is part of our daily life experience. If we look for it, most of us can even find it here and now even if it’s at a very low level.

It’s what happens anytime we identify with a struggle with what’s here in our experience.

TRANSFORMATION

Following an NDE, many say their life is transformed.

It leads to changing our priorities and putting what’s most important – typically connections, love, service – at the center, and the rest more in the periphery.

It leads to appreciating life in a fresh way. They find a deeper appreciation of life as it is.

It leads to a realization that we are not, most fundamentally, this human self.

If we explore what’s on this list and make it into a part of our daily life, that too leads to this type of transformation. It transforms our perception, orientation, and life in the world.

UNIVERSALITY

These types of NDEs are found across cultures. There is a universality to them.

And the same universality is here when it comes to finding what we most fundamentally are in our own experience, and the rest on this list.

HOW CLOSE IS THE MATCH?

I imagine it’s easy to look at this list and think: Yeah, this is contrived and an intellectual exercise. The two – NDEs and what’s here now – are obviously very different.

So how close is the match between the two?

On the surface, it can certainly seem like an intellectual exercise – until we engage with it ourselves, examine it, and actually find it all here and now. Then, we see that the essence is the same. What’s in an NDE is no different from what’s already here, and what we can find when we look.

And finding this in daily life can be as transformative as any NDE experience.

MY OWN STORY

I have been fascinated by NDEs since I first heard about it when I was eight or ten years old. I read anything I could find about it, even back then.

Why? At the time, I didn’t really know. I was just fascinated by it.

Later, I have seen some connections.

When I was little, before school age, I had flashbacks to an earlier time. There was a profound sense of being home, infinite love, all as consciousness, profound understanding, and so on. I was without body, and there were other beings there – infinitely loving and wise – I communicated with now and then. It was all golden light and consciousness. These flashbacks would often happen when I sat outside and saw the light filtered through the leaves of birch trees.

Later, when I was in my teens, I realized that this seemed like flashbacks to a time before this incarnation. I realized that this was very similar to what people describe in NDEs.

And when the initial awakening shift happened in my mid-teens (age sixteen), I also realized that the essence of these flashbacks pointed to what’s already here, and what was revealed in the awakening shift.

tagged: autobiography, big mind process, cosmology, essential topic, headless experiment, headless way, inquiry, near death experience, pointers, world as a mirror   

Alan Watts: For ‘you’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new

moe Leave a comment

You have seen that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate ‘you’ to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real ‘you’ is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For ‘you’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. You do not ask what is the value, or what is the use, of this feeling. Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies?

– Alan Watts

There are two ways to look at this.

One is talking about existence itself, which is more of a third person view and philosophical.

And the other is how it is in our own immediate experience, which is from noticing.

UNIVERSE STORY

We can say that the universe is existence exploring, expressing, experiencing itself in always new ways, including through and as innumerable living beings.

As Carl Sagan said: We are the local eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings of the universe. We are the universe bringing itself into consciousness.

Our most fundamental identity is not as this local and temporary human being, but as the whole of existence taking all of these forms and always changing itself into new forms, expressions, and experiences.

This is a view that can be deeply inspiring and meaningful, and it can deepen our sense of belonging to the universe and all of existence.

We may also find that sensing, feeling, thinking, and living becomes meaningful in itself. And the more this is felt and visceral, the deeper is the sense of belonging.

DIRECT NOTICING

We can also explore this through our own immediate noticing.

When I look, I find I am not most fundamentally this human being. I am what all these changing experiences – of this human self and the wider world – happen within and as. I am capacity for the world, and what my field of experience happens within and as.

In that sense, the world as it appears to me is a magical illusion and a fabulous game. It’s all happening within and as me. It’s all an expression of the creativity of existence and the mind. The only real “me” is capacity for all of it, and all the always-changing content of experience – whether I call this my human self or the wider self or the whole of the universe. To me, it’s all happening within and as consciousness, and it’s all – in a sense – existence looking at itself from a billion points of view.

COSMOLOGY AS A MIRROR

Here too, we find that cosmology is a mirror.

We may have ideas about the universe similar to what Alan Watts describe, and what we find in the Universe Story and the Epic of Evolution, and these may be grounded in science and what we observe.

And we can find it here and now. We can find these mental representations here and now. And we can find what these stories point to in our own immediate experience.

In that sense, cosmology is both a projection and a mirror. We place our mental representations on the universe, and can use them as pointers to what’s already here in our immediate experience.

And there is likely some truth to both. We may be onto something about existence as a whole, and also – equally or more important – about our own true nature.

tagged: alan watts, big history, cosmology, epic of evolution, quote, universe story, who and what we are   

How do you think the universe was created?

moe Leave a comment

I saw this on social media, and there may be some truth to each of these.

COSMOLOGY

Created by God. If we see all of existence as God, then God creates the universe here and now. Spirit creates itself into all there is here and now.

Has been there forever. It may also well be that existence, and perhaps the universe, has no beginning or end in time. It may have been here forever. Perhaps our ideas about beginning and end in time don’t apply.

From the Big Bang. It seems likely that there was a kind of big bang, a rapid expansion around 13-14 billion years ago. This particular version of the universe may have, in a sense, been created then.

Simulated by intelligent beings. We don’t know if our universe is simulated in a conventional sense. But there is another we know for certain it’s simulated. Our experience of the universe is simulated by our body, brain, and mind. Our senses take in a (very limited) range of signals, our brain processes these, we have a certain experience, and this experience is, in a very real sense, simulated. We are the intelligent beings simulating the universe for ourselves so we can make sense of it.

COSMOLOGY IS OUR MIRROR

Any story we have about the world, including any cosmology, is a mirror for ourselves. We can turn the story around to ourselves and find what it points to here and now.

Cosmology is a story of the whole, all of existence. And this points back to our wholeness and all of what we are.

What is this wholeness?

When we find what we are, we find ourselves as capacity for the world, and what our field of experience happens within and as. We can imperfectly label this consciousness.

Created by God. As what we are, as this consciousness, we create the universe here and now. Consciousness creates the universe as it appears to us here and now. Our experience is an expression of the creativity of what we are.

Has been there forever. As what we are, we are – in our experience – timeless. Any sense of time and space happens within and as what we are. In a sense, time and space and the universe happens within and as the timeless.

From the Big Bang. We can find our story of a big bang here and now. In a sense, our early childhood is also a big bang, a gradual complexification of something very simple, although that’s also a story to us and not something happening here and now. What is happening here and now is that we, as the simplicity of capacity for our world, are also the complexity of our experience here and now. This is the no-thing taking the form of the immense complexity of our experiences here and now and the world and the universe as it appears to us.

Simulated by intelligent beings. Our experience of the universe is a simulation. We receive information in our sense fields, and our mental field labels, interprets, and comes up with stories about it. This creates a simulated universe for us and it’s the universe we relate to. This is also what allows us to orient and function in the world.

THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY

Independent of our cosmology, this topic leads us to the ultimate mystery.

Why is there anything at all? How come there is something rather than nothing?

A FEW WORDS ABOUT PROJECTIONS

Our cosmology, and any story we have about anything, is a projection.

And it’s a projection in a few different ways.

The most basic is our mental field overlay. We take in information through our senses, and our mental field creates an overlay of labels and distinctions, and comes up with stories about it. That’s how we make sense of what otherwise would be something undifferentiated we wouldn’t know what to do with. Similarly, our mental field creates the wider world, anything that’s not here in our sense perception, including the wider world and the past and future. This is a kind of projection since we mentally put images and words on top of the world to make sense of it.

When we have a story about anything in the world, we can turn the story back to ourselves and find specific examples of how it’s as or more true. This is another type of projection. Our stories say something about us as a human self in the world.

Sometimes, we are aware of how the story applies to us as well as what it’s apparently about. And sometimes we are not aware of how it equally or more applies to ourselves.

Similarly, sometimes our stories about something in the world are relatively accurate in a conventional sense. And other times, they are more clearly fabrications not grounded in consensus reality.

tagged: cosmology, projections, world as a mirror   

Is my true nature the true nature of all of existence?

moe Leave a comment

Is my true nature the true nature of all of existence? This is a side to awakening that is interesting although it doesn’t have great practical importance for us at an individual level. I thought I would briefly revisit the topic here.

My true nature

Our true nature is capacity for the world, that which all our experiences happen within and as. The content of experience is the normal one – this human self, thoughts, emotions, sensations, the wider world, and so on. The awakeness here is the ordinary awakeness all conscious living beings have. The only thing that changes is that our true nature – this awake capacity – notices itself as all of it.

Since the world to us happens within and as what we are, it seems that the world has the same true nature as ourselves. It has to appear that way to us.

If I am honest, I cannot say that I know for certain that my true nature is the true nature of all of existence.

What are some of the features of our true nature? My true nature is capacity for the world. It’s awake. And it is – if it separates itself a bit from itself – conscious of itself. Those are three aspects that stand out.

The true nature of existence as a whole?

So what about existence as a whole? What can I say about it?

It seems that the true nature of humans is the same as mine, based on their reports. And I have to assume that the true nature of all beings is the same. It’s difficult to imagine it’s otherwise.

Beyond that, it seems that existence as a whole is capacity for itself. It has to be no-thing that’s filled with itself, otherwise, it wouldn’t exist.

Is it awake? Parts must be. In this universe, any conscious being is awake in this sense, whether their true nature notices itself or not. There may also be non-embodied beings that are awake. And yet, other parts may not be awake, like rocks. (When I say awake in this context, I just mean the ordinary awakenes of all conscious beings.)

Is the true nature of all of existence conscious of itself? No, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It is, locally, through some beings, perhaps through some non-embodied beings, and perhaps in a divine realm, but that may be about it.

Does it matter?

Does it matter whether my true nature is the true nature of all of existence?

Not really. It matters in the sense that it’s good to be honest about what we can say something about and what we are guessing or imagining. It also matters for physics and cosmology and our general worldview, although most mainstream physics and cosmology don’t (yet) address these questions. But in a practical sense for us as individuals living our lives in the world, it doesn’t matter so much.

Is all of existence consciousness?

This is a related question. Since my world happens within and as consciousness, it appears to me that all of existence is consciousness. But is it really? It’s a thorny question and I am not sure if I can say much about it, and it also depends on our definition.

We can say that the universe is the body of the divine, or the divine taking a physical form.

And we can, depending on our definition, say it’s consciousness that appears to us as matter and energy. But it’s not necessarily as a whole awake consciousness in the way consciousness is locally awake in and as living beings.

Summary

So locally, existence notices its true nature here and some other places. To me, the true nature of all of existence seems to be the same as my true nature since it happens within and as what I am. It seems that the true nature of all beings is the same as my own true nature. All of existence must be capacity for itself. It’s awake locally through beings in whatever form they take. And the true nature of existence is conscious of itself locally through and as some beings.

tagged: consciousness, cosmology, intellectual honesty, true nature, who and what we are, worldviews   

The One experiencing itself as many

moe Leave a comment

Through noticing what’s here in immediacy, we can find a few things….

We may notice that the One experiences itself as many.

No-thing experiences itself as something.

Consciousness experiences itself as matter.

And sometimes….

The One experiences itself as separation.

Love as not-love.

Clarity as confusion.

It can help to use a more structured form of inquiry to notice this, for instance Headless experiments, the Big Mind process, Living Inquiries, or The Work of Byron Katie.

This is all what we can notice for ourselves here and now.

COSMOLOGY

And we can also see it in the universe as a whole. We can make it into a cosmology. (After all, any cosmology mirror us here and now.)

Existence is oneness experiencing itself as many. No-thing as something. Consciousness as matter.

And sometimes – locally and through us and other beings – oneness experiencing itself as separation, love as not-love, clarity as confusion.

MORE DETAIL

There is easily one or several books worth of material here if we want to go into more detail. I’ll just say a few words.

I find that I am capacity for the world as it appears to me – including this human self and any me or I or observer or doer. That’s the oneness. It all happens within and as what the mind may label consciousness. Within this oneness is immense diversity. The world is many. (It’s an overlay of thought that divides the world up in this way, and it’s a very useful function of thought.)

I find that no-thing experiences itself as something. What I am is no-thing full of the world as it appears to me. No-thing full of somethings. (Again, the somethings are separated from each other through an overlay of thought.)

Similarly, consciousness experiences itself as matter. What I am – and I assume what you are to yourself – can be labeled consciousness. The world as it appears to me happens within and as consciousness. And when thoughts label some things in the world matter, and sensations come in to lend a sense of substance to those thoughts, then consciousness experiences itself as matter.

Also, when these dividing lines created by thoughts – often in the form of mental images – are held as true, there is an experience of separation. So the One experiences itself as separate, as an I here and others out there.

When thoughts are held as true, the mind can tell itself that this human has been wronged, is a victim, and so on. And then love – which is another word for oneness – experiences itself as not-love.

And when the mind takes thoughts as true, clarity – which is yet another word for oneness – can experience itself as confusion.

STRUCTURED FORMS OF INQUIRY

We can all (?) find this for ourselves, and structured forms of noticing – AKA inquiry – can help here.

Headless experiments can help us find ourselves as capacity for the world as it appears to us – including anything connected with this human self and any I or me or observer or doer.

The Big Mind process can help us find ourselves as Big Mind (AKA capacity full of the world), Big Heart, and a variety of other aspects of what and who we are.

Living Inquiry – which is based on traditional Buddhist inquiry – can help us explore in detail how thoughts (words and mental images) combine with sensations to create our experience. Specifically, it’s helpful to notice how the mind associates certain sensations with certain thoughts, and these thoughts lend a sense of meaning to the sensations, and the sensation give the thoughts a sense of substance, reality, and even truth.

The Work of Byron Katie is a great help in exploring thoughts we take as true, and in finding what’s more true for us in our own direct experience.

There are many other forms of inquiry out there as well, which may work as well or better for you. These are just the ones I happen to be familiar with.

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tagged: big mind process, cosmology, essential topic, headless way, inquiry, lila, living inquiries / kiloby inquiries, oneness, the work of byron katie   

BBC Horizon: Is everything we know about the Universe wrong?

moe Leave a comment

Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? is another excellent BBC Horizon documentary.

Cosmology is undergoing a great shift. The traditional Standard Model is unsatisfactory because it does not explain dark matter or dark energy. And the modifications to the Standard Model that do are unsatisfactory because they are inelegant add-ons. Something is missing from our understanding of the universe, and it is either new forms of matter and energy, our understanding of the basic habits (natural laws) of the universe, or a combination of both.

It is another reminder that what we think we know about anything, however elaborate or useful it may seem, is vanishingly small compared to the infinity we do not know. Our experience is always very limited. (*) And our interpretations of this experience is just one of an indefinite number of possible interpretations, some of which would make equally much or more sense to us than the ones we are currently aware of.

Whenever we have a story about something, there will always be something that doesn’t fit. And if this is something that appears significant to us, or if many smaller things that do not fit keep cropping up, it requires us to reorient, to reorganize how we look at ourselves and/or the rest of the world.

It is a continuous process for us at individual and collective levels.

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tagged: cosmology, documentary, science, worldviews   

Big Bang in two minutes

moe Leave a comment

A great example of cosmology as a reflection of what is here now.

It may well be a good model of what happened in a conventional sense, but it is also a good model of how our experience of the world is created here now.

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tagged: cosmology, projections