The ever presence of "ultimate reality"?

I was reading this excerpt from Ken Wilber's book "One Taste" and these two paragraphs struck me as interesting.

Quote :

I became extremely serious about meditation practice when I read the following line from the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi: "That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real."

That is a shocking statement, because basically, there is nothing— literally nothing—in the deep dreamless state. That was his point. Ultimate reality (or Spirit), Ramana said, cannot be something that pops into consciousness and then pops out. It must be something that is constant, permanent, or, more technically, something that, being timeless, is fully present at every point in time. Therefore, ultimate reality must also be fully present in deep dreamless sleep, and anything that is not present in deep dreamless sleep is NOT ultimate reality.

What are your thoughts on this? I have a few of my own but I'm interested in hearing other's views first.

This is why I leave philosophy to philosophers. B asically S illy.

Hunger is reality. The absence of thought is just that: I call it a dullness. We hunger for success, for happiness, we take for granted our next breath, or glass of water. Do without either and the poet’s words become clear:

To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

It is implicit in being a sentient being.

A void is the manifestation of Sri Ramana Maharshi idea. That is probably the source of the word ‘avoid’.

Well, I think that completely misses the point. Hunger is an attachment to a body. What he is saying, is that people come into existence and out of existence, as does every object, none of it is permenant, so it isn't the most real thing there can be. Whatever it is that is the context in which these "things" move in and out of existence, that is always present, must be the only thing that is truly real. Everything else is a type of illusion.

An analogy might be like a video game. Each time you start up the game a sequence of events unfolds with a variable of you decisions durring the game. When you're done, you turn the game off. When you return, you start it back up again. So, the reality of the game is not in the sequence of actions that occur each time you play, but rather in the game system itself, because without such, there is no sequence of actions. All the "illusions" of the game depend upon the context of its programming. The constant background awareness is the "real" aspect to all the "illusions" of your attachments, including your body and its attachment to being nourished.

When I say "illusion", I don't mean to imply it is of no consequence, I simply mean it is of no permenance. If the background awareness is "real", then after the illusion it has attached itself to in the form of your bodymind fades, it will simply form an attachment to another illusions, and so on and so forth. The eternal aspect to the temporal adventures, if you will.

-TC

Ultimate Reality?

For my part I would say that Ultimate Reality is the universe which exists whether there is a concsious witness to it or not. Long before mankind grew a huge brain and started to gaze up at the sky in wonder, the universe was there. Stuff just chugging along, the big wheel turning.

We're just lucky to be here, trying to make sense of the great mystery.

In the words of another poet;

"Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand."

Travis Clementsmith wrote:

If the background awareness is "real", then after the illusion it has attached itself to in the form of your bodymind fades, it will simply form an attachment to another illusions, and so on and so forth. The eternal aspect to the temporal adventures, if you will.

-TC

I guess the question is, (and just to play devil's advocate) is this ever present awareness really "ultimate reality"? Just because it's ever present for us doesn't mean it's so for everybody or everything. It may infact be just as "illusionary" as every other aspect of our manifest being and may not have existed at all before our minds evolved to they're current capacities and may not exist at all after we die.

Personally I think "ultimate reality" includes everything whether it's perminant or not.

Aaron wrote:

Personally I think "ultimate reality" includes everything whether it's perminant or not.

I agree, and that's a fairly profound concept. If you think about it, even our fictional creations; characters, ideas, our stories themselves are ultimately real. Mythology is real in that it affects culture, it dictates ideology, and alters our perception of the universe.

Quote :

If you think about it, even our fictional creations; characters, ideas, our stories themselves are ultimately real. Mythology is real in that it affects culture, it dictates ideology, and alters our perception of the universe.

But all those things are mental constructs that eventually disappear with us. How then can they be ultimate reality? (unless of course we survive this veil of tears. But then we're also looking at what was before we were.) They may alter our perception of reality but not the reality itself.

I think mythology can most certainly alter the universe. Not at a universal scale of course but at least at a human scale.

What I'm saying is that mythology is real to the extent that it is real to us. It affects our behavior, changes our perceptions of the universe - therefore no matter where the story came from it interacts with the universe and takes on a kind of existence of its own.

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true". - Jean Baudrillard

Humans are innate story tellers, myth makers, and we inhabit those stories to an extant that they are more real then reality. Any look at religious fundamentalism, or cultural prejudice of any sort, clearly shows this to be true.

We think we own our stories, but in reality our stories - our collective mythology and imagery - owns us.

Fascinating discussion. I appreciate the other points and the other ways of looking at the universe, but I guess I'm a bit of a realist and pretty well agree with Beowulf on this one.

Quote :

I became extremely serious about meditation practice when I read the following line from the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi: "That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real."

That is a shocking statement, because basically, there is nothing— literally nothing—in the deep dreamless state. That was his point. Ultimate reality (or Spirit), Ramana said, cannot be something that pops into consciousness and then pops out. It must be something that is constant, permanent, or, more technically, something that, being timeless, is fully present at every point in time. Therefore, ultimate reality must also be fully present in deep dreamless sleep, and anything that is not present in deep dreamless sleep is NOT ultimate reality.

I just wanted to take one more stab at this (which was going to be my original argument anyway.) The statement by Sri Ramana is an assertion based on phenomenological experience. It has been shown that mental phenomenological experiences are accompanied by correlative brain activity. In the case of deep dreamless sleep it happens to be delta waves.

In Wilber's argument he states that "Ultimate Reality" is timeless and "cannot be something that pops into consciousness and then pops out." Well the problem that I have is "delta waves" which correlate to deep dreamless sleep pop in and out of our consciousness all the time. (Unless we are advanced meditators that is.) When we are awake for instance delta waves are at a minimum. Therefore what we experience in deep sleep can not be anymore related to "Ultimate Reality" then any other states.

You know what Aaron.

I think you know I go overboard to be tolerant of other world views, other religions, other faiths, other systems, other deistic interpretations. Personally I can't get by the world phenomenological.

But that doesn't matter. I feel you're as good a person as me maybe gooder, as smart maybe smarter, so I respect your world view.

But did I say, I can't get by phenomenoligical. Maybe I'll try completely sober.

Helium wrote:

But did I say, I can't get by phenomenoligical. Maybe I'll try completely sober.

Merriam-Webster defines phenomenological as...

phenomenological : of or relating to phenomenology.

That should clear things up right?

Does it have anything to do with ...
feminenology

Yes for most men it does.

Aaron wrote:

Yes for most men it does.

LOL