What something actually is, is dependent on what is perceiving it. A flower is not the same thing to a human that it is to a bee, and so on.
Human perception is distorted by the brain’s conditioning, so unless the human brain can perceive its own conditioning (see it for what it is), it is hopelessly confused and its thinking, incoherent.
A big “if”. Can I look at anything “without any reaction”? Isn’t “I” a reactor?
Pursuit is “silly” when it’s quixotic, and a pursuit can be heroic, inspired, rewarding, but I don’t see how an image can pursue anything. Please explain.
True , perception is distorted by brain’s conditioning. But when does that distortion of perception reveals or takes place, is it not at the moment of thinking/ feeling while looking. So when one looks at a flower with no response with thought / feeling, just looks even if it is for a fraction of a second, then he sees what is subject to the limitation of his vision like color blind etc, is it not so ?
Yes it is possible to look at thing without reaction, just look, even if it is for a fraction of a second. At that moment there is no division as observer and observed, just looking without a centre but it does not mean one becomes the thing. This is said not as an intellectual concept / idea but as an actuality but it is also true that it last maximum few seconds and thought and feeling rush in creating the division of observer and observed.
Isn’t my sorrow the result of the deeply entrenched conviction that somehow, someway, what happened ‘could’ have happened some other way than it happened? That it ‘could’ have been different?
That doesn’t arise for me for something that happens in Nature, but it does when something happens to me?
Or what I think we actually are, nothing.
Yes, we know we are not perceiving directly, but in accordance with what we believe to be true, much of which is as false and misleading as it is necessary and useful.
In other words, we’re not free to see because what we presume to know alters perception and perpetuates belief, suspicion, fear and desire. And, as was pointed out recently, we don’t have the energy to bring this disorder to order because it requires all of our energy to maintain the comfort zone of our thought-created reality.
Similar question? Am I real or just a persistent ‘image’ created by thought in order to be some ‘thing’: the thinker, the experiencer, the observer?
If I could know that I am “just a persistent ‘image’ created by thought in order to be some thing, e.g., the thinker, the experiencer, the observer”, I would be free to be that for those who are doing the same thing, and free to be what actually is when others aren’t present.
I don’t understand whats going on here? Freedom from self is dependant on other people?
The brain / mind is awash in thinking. The brains are basically the same as is this ‘stream’ of thought. The content of the thinking differs due to memories, experiences, knowledge, etc. It also differs in each brain by having certain patterns that form. The brain is really only quiet in dreamless sleep. Can this constant movement stop? Mustn’t there be ‘awareness’ of its movement? The movement that goes on ‘mechanically’? So mechanically that the brain is not aware of its almost constant activity?
No. I’m speculating that if you’re free of self and have to live and work with those who are not free of self, you might have to pretend to be as self-centered as they are to get along with them. But I know nothing about freedom, so…
Okay! Damn! This means that the crazy looking guy that hangs out on the roundabout muttering about cosmic windshield wipers may also be a Buddha in disguise 
Quite the contrary. If you’re free and you don’t want people to think you’re not “with them”, on the same page, etc., you don’t want to stand out or appear to be any different than they are. There must be better ways to awaken others than to make a spectacle of oneself.
The fact is that if I had an image of myself as an enlightened being (person who was free) and wanted people to have a certain, image of me (different in this case from the image that I have of myself) - this complex, and confused relationship with the world dictated by the images held and those that should be held - is just the usual confusion.
Maybe the person who views themself as free may even have the memory of some insight - but this description of conflict & confusion is not freedom of intelligence.
The image that you (Inquiry) have presented, how you imagine a “freed” person would be, is the spitting image of what us confused/non-liberated folk do all the time
Many of us, when we interact with others, are actually playing a game of chess with the images of the subject & object (me & you) involved in the conversation.
For example, in your interactions on the forum you (Inquiry) sometimes address the paradox caused by your image of what an enlightened person would do if they were as you imagined them to be. (usually to do with how someone who said something clever couldn’t be enlightened, because a real enlightened person would be off somewhere else doing enlightened stuff)
If we see the problem caused by confusing our images for truth, surely this could provoke an awareness (of the process in action) and (at least temporary) liberation from delusion?
Here is the ‘problem’ as seen here. We don’t realize that we are, as JK put it, “nothing”. The ‘things’ we aren’t are the thinking process and it’s movement, the body and its functions, the brain etc.
So if it is true that we are not-a-thing, then we can consider his other message: “you are the world.” The ‘world’ has no boundaries. Freedom has no boundaries, no ‘center’…so all that we have taken as ‘us’ has been a terrible mistake. And denied us up to now, the possibility of realizing this. Before the body dies, which it will and this possibility with it.
Dear Dan, The pressure is really on! You are pointing at some really tricky esoteric Everests that we must attain before the body dies : realizing that I am the world and at the same time nothing (rather than the central figure in the world that I seem to be).
I am nothing is probably the trickiest one to wrap my head around.
Good luck to us all - may the force be with us!
We have already had the ‘luck’ to come upon this message…and some kind of ‘force’ seems necessary to break apart the delusion that we are not the ‘world’?