Bedrock

This thread has involuntarily inspired me.

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Organic substance
Mostly water
Blood and faeces
Sweat and skin residue
After shave to hide
Clothes to conceal
Whiskey to escape
All this is real

This is me
My fingers, my hands, my arms and in every part
I am organic

This is me
Nature control, desires rule
I am organic

This is me
Thoughts and dreams, unattainable ambitions
I am organic after all

This is me
Floating experience and understanding
I am organic after all

This is me
Unable to understand my own simple truth
I am organic after all

This is me
Here I am
I am truth
Reality through me
Me from reality
Unaware of my own true self
Barely able to see me
Barely able to hear me
Barely able to sense me
Reality lost
I am truth
Here I am
This is me
Can't you see me?
Why can't I see you?
What is the meaning of all this?
I am truth, I am organic, and I am lost
Truth is lost
Truth is organic
Truth is weak
Truth is arousal
Truth is real
Truth is reality
Truth is ugly
Truth is stench
Truth is pretty
Truth flowery scent
And I seek
I seek me
I seek truth
I seek reality
State of confusion
System failure of organic proportions
Thoughts collapsing
Ideas wavering
What am I?

This is me

What is real?

Confusion is real
It is my home
My place to be
Without which I am nothing
Without which I am not me
Confusion is reality through necessity
I am reality
I am real
I am organic

This is me and all I am is this

Originally posted by vistesd
I am not aware of a faith that is not a faith in something.

You can have faith in an experience. You can have faith in an idea. The idea may come from a translation of the experience that you make.

[I’ve talked about what I call “immediate translation” of experience into representational content before. Just as our brain translates visual st ...[text shortened]... ng an idea, a concept—that may or may not result from a mental translation from an experience...

Faith does not produce either knowledge or reality. Your faith, as you have articulated it, seems to be faith in the idea of a reality that that you cannot experience.

True, faith does not itself produce knowledge or reality, instead it ushers a person into the presence of the One Who is knowledge and reality.

Of course, there is the 'idea' of God communicated by the biblical texts, but that idea is not the same as the conviction/assurance experience of God, which is a spiritual experience, being of an altogether different character than sensory experience or intellectual apprehension. (We may not be able to discuss this further, I'm afraid, because our beliefs on the following subject are so radically different.)

We can know plenty enough about God without ever meeting Him personally. Though, after a person receives the impartation of the Holy Spirit, which occurs the moment he or she believes the promises of God (God's words), then it is possible to experience God directly/personally.

Here we must make the leap from pure mental experience into the realm of the human spirit. In the spirit rests the hidden operation of intuition, communion, and conscience; functions operating quite independently of the mind, i.e. the 'intuition' of God and of God's will is a direct knowing, rather than the process of knowing engaged in by the mind (with its ideas about God).

Without the aid of the Holy Spirit it is all but impossible to discern what exactly is of the spirit and what exactly is of the mind; to the unenlightened (read unfaithful) both the functioning of the mind and the spirit are indistinguishable. Thus the need for God's word. "The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit" (Heb. 4:12).

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I guess at bottom what I'm trying to say is, your 'bedrock' is not really the true bedrock at all. Experience of the world through the mind and flesh is your idea of what is 'bedrock', but faith reveals the bedrock of the spirit. A world of the spirit independent of and preeminent to the material world. Your bedrock is temporal, while the bedrock of the spirit is eternal; that is, one is a house built on sand, and the other is a house built on a Rock.

Originally posted by Sepia Tint
"Christ saith this, the apostles saith that, but what canst thou say?" George Fox

I am not sure that many Christian Mystics would agree with your statement to the degree that they probably derive their faith from an overwhelming sense of the "presence of God" in their experience of reality.

The presence of God which the mystic knows is a spiritual discernment, independent of direct sensory experience or mental construct.

Originally posted by epiphinehas
[b]Faith does not produce either knowledge or reality. Your faith, as you have articulated it, seems to be faith in the idea of a reality that that you cannot experience.

True, faith does not itself produce knowledge or reality, instead it ushers a person into the presence of the One Who is knowledge and reality.

Of course, there ...[text shortened]... that is, one is a house built on sand, and the other is a house built on a Rock.[/b]

(1) I do not exclude “intuition” from my view.

(2) You’re probably right about our impasse (Hey, we’ve done that before! 😉 ). But I would say that the impasse is largely because we interpret similar experiences differently. (And you probably know what I think of the “If you had the Holt Spirit, you would see your experience exactly the same as mine” type of charge. I neither accept it, nor, hopefully, level the same type of counter-charge—although you will recall that I once did, in terms of Taoism, just for the illustration, which you took well.)

(3) What you see as going beyond what I have (perhaps clumsily) called “bedrock,” I see as moving back from bedrock to interpretation. I take all your comments in that vein. Which likely means that (a) while you see me as either not having, or not correctly understanding, true spiritual experience, (b) I see you as illusively confusing reality with interpretation.

I have been thinking about some of Sepia Tint’s comments a lot, and want to reinforce that we are so intimately entangled with the rest of reality, that the separate of “I” from the rest of it is simply a matter of viewpoint, from the perspective of our self-looping consciousness. Thanks to BdN for bringing that to the fore...

(4) Please note that I have not taken any stand here on the possible truth of any interpretive claims, including what I see as yours, in this exercise. I have only tried to distinguish the “bedrock” of unencumbered (albeit self-inclusive—if you can get past the problematics of that word “self” ) awareness from the activities of translation/interpretation.

We seem to agree on the function of pointing; we disagree as to what is pointing to what...

Originally posted by stocken
This thread has involuntarily inspired me.

---

Organic substance
Mostly water
Blood and faeces
Sweat and skin residue
After shave to hide
Clothes to conceal
Whiskey to escape
All this is real

This is me
My fingers, my hands, my arms and in every part
I am organic

This is me
Nature control, desires rule
I am organic

This is me
Thoug ...[text shortened]... ty through necessity
I am reality
I am real
I am organic

This is me and all I am is this

Nice to see you still hangin' around here, Stock. And contributing your poetry. I'm gonna think about that one for awhile...

Originally posted by epiphinehas
The presence of God which the mystic knows is a spiritual discernment, independent of direct sensory experience or mental construct.

Not sure about this...

Are you saying that "spiritual discernment" is outside of a reality that can be experienced? Is this discernment by, for example, a kind of sixth spiritual sense? By discernment are you making sense of shapes in fog, or are you applying some kind of judgement process...(Chambers English Dictionary)

Are roads to Damascus experienced or discerned?

Originally posted by vistesd
(1) I do not exclude “intuition” from my view.

(2) You’re probably right about our impasse (Hey, we’ve done that before! 😉 ). But I would say that the impasse is largely because we interpret similar experiences differently. (And you probably know what I think of the “If you had the Holt Spirit, you would see your experience exactly the same as mine” ...[text shortened]...

We seem to agree on the function of pointing; we disagree as to what is pointing to what...

I suppose my question is really about whether the bedrock of unencumbered awareness is any more than a theoretical notion. Because awareness implies some kind of conciousness being present, that conciousness is probably applying a frame of reference to what is experienced, in order to experience it in the first place. I am not sure how things would be if we experienced the world at a molecular level for example, or to a different time frame, one closer to eternity, say....

Originally posted by Sepia Tint
Not sure about this...

Are you saying that "spiritual discernment" is outside of a reality that can be experienced? Is this discernment by, for example, a kind of sixth spiritual sense? By discernment are you making sense of shapes in fog, or are you applying some kind of judgement process...(Chambers English Dictionary)

Are roads to Damascus experienced or discerned?

The spiritual sense is purely intuitive, although it can have a trickle down effect upon the soul. The soul, as a direct result of a movement of the spirit, can experience peace, joy, elation, lightness, comfort, love, etc. independent of circumstance (e.g. a spiritual person about to be crucified may experience great joy in spirit, though suffer greatly outwardly), but such experiences are in no way necessary to spiritual discernment.

The bottom line is, spiritual knowledge can only be arrived at through the spirit, not through the agency of the soul. The real confusion prior to enlightenment (i.e. sanctification through God's Spirit) is what exactly arises from the soul and what exactly arises from the spirit, within an individual's consciousness. The process of discernment is really the increasing recognition of what is of the spirit and what is not; what is Truth and what is not.

Like the emotions, the mind can also grasp what the spirit wordlessly communicates, and can be used to interpret what is directly apprehended spiritually. (The desired result of the Spirit's sanctifying an individual, in fact, is to eventually restore the mind to its proper subservient relation to the spirit.) In this way, a person's soul is able to decipher the will of God through the spirit, meaning that person's will is provided with the option of either following God's will or the demands of the flesh.

Such spiritual discernment is not so much outside of reality, as it is a direct contact with the deepest aspect of reality. And in a very real way it is a sixth sense. For example, mediums and psychics use their gifts, really spiritual gifts, to interpret whatever insight their abnormally developed intuition provides.

However, until a person is born again, until God's spirit inhabits the believer's spirit, the human spirit cannot be a vehicle for intuition of God's will, nor of communion with God, nor of an enlightened conscience.

The sanctification process a Christian goes through allows him or her to develop a recognition of spiritual vs. soulish, primarily tutored according to the revealed will of God recorded in the biblical texts. The general rule is that the spirit is always contrary to the flesh (and in this instance, by 'flesh' I mean a person's soul and body together - his very 'self'😉.

Originally posted by Sepia Tint
I suppose my question is really about whether the bedrock of unencumbered awareness is any more than a theoretical notion. Because awareness implies some kind of conciousness being present, that conciousness is probably applying a frame of reference to what is experienced, in order to experience it in the first place. I am not sure how things would be if ...[text shortened]... at a molecular level for example, or to a different time frame, one closer to eternity, say....

For me, “unencumbered awareness” mainly means unencumbered by “thinking-about.” I know of no experience that is not “framed” by our consciousness. I suspect that that is inescapable, and is part of the bedrock (a term which I have chosen—actually, borrowed from Wittgenstein, for my own purposes however—because it indicates what we cannot get beyond). I do not think we can get beyond our own consciousness.

However, we can realize that the self-looping aspect of our consciousness can create an impression that we are separate from the world we view. The “I” is, in that respect, a construct of consciousness, not a reality that precedes it.

In the bedrock experience, one realizes the relativity of that “I-construct.” Our intimate connection with (entanglement with) the rest of reality is certainly framed by our consciousness, but not by the I-construct. The I-construct is useful; but it is not “bedrock”. So, unencumbered awareness also means an awareness unencumbered by that self-looping construct. It does not, however, mean an awareness unencumbered by the simple framing activity of our consciousness. We do not have a view from elsewhere, let alone a view from nowhere.

One of the thoughts that does not arise in the “bedrock” awareness is the thought of—“I”.