Think

Originally posted by josephw
What do you mean 'the nature of our thoughts'?

A trillion brain cells. Electrical/chemical processes. Is thought more than these?

Whatever you (we) think is a result of cognitive appearances, whose source is a fusion of karmic potential and your (our) mental continuums. All cognitive appearances are like illusions because they seem to appear that they arise from actual objectively existing objects. Since on one hand they do not exist in that impossible way for they lack of inherent existence, and since on the other hand thought keeps up clinging to these empty existing reference points as if they were not empty, ultimate reality is always contained within the limit of the non-inherent existence of the thing under observation
😵

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
Hey vistesd - been reading Karen Armstrong's The Case For God: passage about Socrates, Plato - the nature of dialogue; writing being no more than a paedagogical tool, aide-memoire (even the magnificent Phaedrus) which prompts me to ask: dialogue - it implies a predisposition towards friendship, doesn't it, rather than the adversarial cut-and-thrust? Even between relative opposites.

Well, my thinking has certainly been up-leveled by my time on here—often by people with whom I nearly always disagreed, but with whom I was able to maintain a friendly relationship (despite the arguments sometimes getting a bit sharp, and my own occasional harsh reactions). For example—and reaching back some years—I had a debate with lucifershammer (went pretty much mano y mano) on the question of papal supremacy (I took an Orthodox position), and another with Epiphenehas on universal salvation, in which my “opponent” forced me to research hard, learn more, and articulate more clearly as we went; and both debates ended with a friendly impasse.

When the decorum breaks down to the point where that kind of thing can’t happen, it’s a waste.

Originally posted by vistesd
Well, my thinking has certainly been up-leveled by my time on here—often by people with whom I nearly always disagreed, but with whom I was able to maintain a friendly relationship (despite the arguments sometimes getting a bit sharp, and my own occasional harsh reactions). For example—and reaching back some years—I had a debate with lucifershammer (went pr ...[text shortened]...
When the decorum breaks down to the point where that kind of thing can’t happen, it’s a waste.

EDIT to the above post: Not to mention the times folks such as blackbeetle and yourself, and bbarr and LJ and rwingett and twhitehead a time or two, and most recently, in this thread, JS357, have plucked me back out of the fog in which I had managed again to immerse myself. 🙂 The fact that I can pack my nondualism through a number of religious expressions lies in the fact that I take almost all religious language to be mythological, allegorical, symbolic, allusive and elicitive—and aesthetic. But I still occasionally get caught in the “bewitchment” of that very language—that is nearly always intended to point beyond itself to the ineffable ground—from which, in which and of which we also are.