What is a fact?

Truth. Oi! We need a (lonnnnnng) thread to figure that one out. :wink:

The question “What’s really going on here?” involves everything’s relationship with everything, right? Indra’s Net. I tend to think of nature as everything, the totality, so yes I feel ‘truth’ involves nature.

Totally! Panpsychism makes all sorts of sense to me.

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Facts are appearances, the way things manifest to the senses and mind.

???

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Appearances of what, Rick?

Would it be more accurate to say : Appearances are Facts?

Phenomena do arise. Appearances are projected. I have (or am) my beliefs etc…
These would appear to be facts. (all facts held by me are tentative)

Yeah, that’s where it gets really interesting for me.

Yes appearances are facts, because they appear.

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Facts are seeable without speculation. If speculation is required, even a smidgen, it’s at best fact-ish.

What are the consequences of living ~100% in facts, moving from fact to fact to fact? Why do we resist this so passionately? What are we afraid of?

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I think, these are good questions.

May be due to our conditioning we have become like that.

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It could be said that this is always inevitably the case - your question has more to do with perception (of the everpresent facts) - what is has no consequence. What does perception of what is mean?

Why are rocks hard? This might just be what we call strongly aggregated minerals.

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Good question. I suppose we are talking about psychological facts, principally, right? - We can talk about scientific facts all day, but that is not the same thing. There are some facts we can only read about or know of indirectly, from a third person point of view - such as, what is going on right now on the other side of the planet? what kind of physics is taking place on the rim of a black hole? etc.

But psychological facts are whatever is happening within us (in the first person) or around us (also in the first person).

What I understand K to be doing is to expand the bandwidth of what we consider to be first person facts, to also include the pain and suffering of humanity as a whole. So when he says that one is the world, that one is humanity - meaning that the suffering of humanity is also my suffering - he is wanting to bring to our attention a deeper fact of which we might be unaware (but that we can become aware of).

However, if one does not feel that sense of global human response, then one cannot call it a fact. So the fact then would be more personal. What ‘I’ feel now, in this moment - etc. We would have to begin from there.

Right?

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We’re afraid of losing the sense of oneself. If, for instance, I were to lose everything I believe to be true and false, I’d panic and have to be sedated because I’m not capable of abiding what actually is until I’ve lost all confidence in my ability to arbitrate reality.

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That makes sense to me. If a fact is something seen directly without speculation, what can we reliably call facts? The objects of our perception, right? What we see, hear, feel, taste, smell, and cognize mentally: think, imagine, remember, feel (emotion), dream, invent, contemplate, usw.

It might be a good to limit ‘fact’ to that which we perceive right now, as you suggested. Is anger a fact? Yes if you are angry right now, no if not. By ‘right now’ I mean literally right now. If anger ended a half second before, the fact of anger is no more, though the fact of remembering might be.

What are the consequences of moving from fact to fact, where facts only last however long the direct perception lasts? Would it be like riding the utter crest of the ‘wave of now?’

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Is that a fact? For you? For us? Universally? If you are not afraid of losing the sense of yourself in this moment, is being afraid of losing the sense of yourself a fact?

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It’s an underlying fear that is only a fact on the rare occasion when one’s content is questionable. As you know, most of what thought is doing is unconscious. For the self-centered mind, the ego, the “ground” is the fear of an earthquake that topples everything it has accumulated and built, reducing it to rubble.

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Is the underlying fear of losing the sense of yourself an unconscious fact? Is that a useful idea, that there exist conscious and unconscious facts?

Yes, I like this.

However, whether one can articulate this or share this in our dialogues here is another matter. It is difficult enough to share this perceptual present when we are dialoguing with each other in person, directly - in fact, it is difficult enough to be aware of this perceptual present when we are just by ourselves, alone!

Maybe if we could draw upon the sense of the perceptual present - the ‘wave of now’ - when we are discussing things here, online…? Is this what we are asking?

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To see the consequences of moving from fact to fact, you’d need to observe yourself doing it, bearing in mind that the act of observing will likely distort your findings.

I’m up for giving it a shot. You?

Rupert Spira often works this way, uses pure subjective experience as the foundation for inquiry.

One of the things I noticed about ‘moving from fact to fact’ is that attention makes facts visible, conscious. In other words, in order to move from fact to fact, you need to be attentive or the facts won’t appear. Unless you believe that facts are facts, regardless of if they are attended to.

What is the difference between fact and truth? I do not know, tell me in simple words such that we can see what it is. :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes. There are constantly things happening - in the mind, in the body, and in the world around us - of which we are mostly unaware. And of course, just because we are unaware of them doesn’t mean that they are not taking place.

So by being aware we begin to find out what is already happening (remembering that we said facts are what is happening and what has happened). We are playing ‘catch-up’ with what already is the case, with what is already happening (or has already happened - if what has happened has left traces of itself in our mind/body).

When the surf board meets the wave :ocean: in order to ride it, the surfer can be said to have ‘caught up’ with the wave that was already there. Similarly, our awareness needs in some sense to ‘catch up’ with the inward (and outward) facts that are already present and active.

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