Do you believe in levels of consciousness?

You can pay attention to things Obi but its different than being aware of them. Thats science i learned in school!

Also... what is being presumped? nothing! are you "aware" of the force? at least at some level. If you are not well I would say you are in the wrong place! If you are aware of the force at some level, which is the highest state of being from which all other things are connected then what is in the middle between us and the force must be something. this is speculation not presumption and its based on experience of my own. I didnt presumped anyhting! I have seen the layers, I wonder if others have as well.

Fyxe wrote: ... what is being presumped? nothing! are you "aware" of the force? at least at some level. If you are not well I would say you are in the wrong place!

Yea, nothing being "presumped" here at all, huh... You are not "presumping" what this place is or is supposed to be, do you? You have not "presumped" that who does or doesn't belong here, have you? Why don't you go ahead and "presump" that all who are here just automatially think as you do, while you're at it? Why even ask if you already have all the answers anyway? What is the point? Is this about collecting confirmation, all the while telling off whoever grants too little?

If you are aware of the force at some level, which is the highest state of being from which all other things are connected then what is in the middle between us and the force must be something.

No, that does not follow. Just because there are two distinguishable things (pretending for a moment that anything is meant by this word assembly at all) does not mean that anything must be "between" them. We can clearly tell the air inside a balloon from that balloon's rubbery skin, but to speak of something "between" one and the other requires some heavy and awkward re-definitions before it can make any sense at all. So far there is no telling how what you mean by "us" and what you mean by "the Force" relate, if at all. Spouting out platitudes is all well and dandy but if you have an aspiration to make some semblance of sense any time soon, I'm afraid you have most of your homework still ahead of you...

this is speculation not presumption and its based on experience of my own. I didnt presumped anyhting! I have seen the layers, I wonder if others have as well.

Still waiting on the part where you (or anyone who feels like they understand what you are even talking about, really) explain what "levels of consciousness" are supposed to be. If you have seen them, surely, you can show them to others, can you not? And if you cannot, then how can you know that you have seen them yourself in the first place?

why do you keep telling me you do not believe in the force when this is on the very doctrine of this place?

Jediism is a religion based on the observance of the Force, a ubiquitous and metaphysical power that a Jedi (a follower of Jediism) believes to be the underlying, fundamental nature of the universe.

I am here to explore this force that is described in the doctrine. If you are not then it seems you are in the wrong place to discuss this topic. that is logical to me, is it not to you?

I know there are things between me and the force, I was asking if others have seen these things. the start of this discussion was that very qauestion so I dont know why you attack that?

Fyxe wrote: why do you keep telling me you do not believe in the force when this is on the very doctrine of this place?

Nobody told you they do not believe in the Force. Why do you keep lying about what people say to you? Also, even members are not obliged to sign the front page or to vow to believe any specific interpretation of it, so I don't know why you think it is of any consequence what the front page says.

Jediism is a religion based on the observance of the Force, a ubiquitous and metaphysical power that a Jedi (a follower of Jediism) believes to be the underlying, fundamental nature of the universe.

I am here to explore this force that is described in the doctrine. If you are not then it seems you are in the wrong place to discuss this topic. that is logical to me, is it not to you?

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by explore, because certainly it does not entail proposing models or discussing them. Your response to questions is either to ignore them or to question how "Jedi-y" the asking one is, and your own questions boil down to "Who else thinks like I do?" than any kind of inquiry. Like in this very thread, as you go on to say in the post I'm quoting from, you ask if others have seen "these things" and yet when I dare ask what you mean by "these things" all I get is a lecture about who belongs on the site and who doesn't.

Frankly, and no offense, dear Fyxe, but even considering only my addressing your threads I feel like I have done somewhat of a tiny part in exploring and discussing the Force "described in the doctrine", simply by looking at the actual line you are referencing and pointing out but a tiny sliver of all the ways it could be interpreted. Meanwhile you... just pasted it here for our convenience... and pointed fingers at those who say that maybe there is more to the endeavour than just quoting the front page...


So, with that out of the way, I ask a third time, in the hopes of actually moving the discussion forward by a noteworthy margin: What do you mean by "levels of consciousness"?

I have some problems with this kind of approach - not the ultimate message, necessarily, but the approach:

Gisteron wrote: Yea, nothing being "presumped" here at all, huh... You are not "presumping" what this place is or is supposed to be, do you? You have not "presumped" that who does or doesn't belong here, have you? Why don't you go ahead and "presump" that all who are here just automatially think as you do, while you're at it? Why even ask if you already have all the answers anyway? What is the point? Is this about collecting confirmation, all the while telling off whoever grants too little? ...

Still waiting on the part where you (or anyone who feels like they understand what you are even talking about, really) explain what "levels of consciousness" are supposed to be. If you have seen them, surely, you can show them to others, can you not? And if you cannot, then how can you know that you have seen them yourself in the first place?

I'm reminded of a story I read in my youth, presented as fact. A lapse in memory about one character's name prohibits me from confirming its veracity, so consider it a fable if you wish. A famed orchestra conductor - we'll call him Mr. Swanson - of several decades ago was rehearsing with his orchestra for an upcoming public performance. After trying to explain how he wanted the musicians to play a particular passage, one of them said, "Mr. Swanson, what you're saying doesn't make any sense!" To which the conductor replied, "Never say, 'What you are saying doesn't make any sense.' Rather say, 'Mr. Swanson, I do not understand what you are saying.'"

There's a sense of humility advocated in that story that I think would be helpful here. There wasn't need to ridicule a mistake in grammar, nor in mischaracterizing a challenge to the logic of a position as "telling off".

Still ... the question is legitimate. "Levels of consciousness" is imo a phrase to which meaning is imparted by individuals who have had some kind of experience which, commonly, is perceived to transcend an exclusive awareness of the 3D reality that we all share. Not everyone has had such an experience, and those who have not are understandably going to challenge the reality of an assertion that sounds no different than the claim of a madman, and to have questions about it. I'd say "What do you mean by 'levels of consciousness?'" is a perfectly legitimate question.

I am out of time to elaborate further, but that's my two cents (or about twenty cents when measures in 2019 dollars, heh.)

you dear gist, said I presumped people here believed in the force and by that I take it to mean that you do not believe in the force. why is that so hard to figure out? Is it not a valid assuming to thing people here, at the jedi teimple, woujld believe in the force?

by explore I mean talk about, that is also what I am doing, or trying to do anyway. and if you read my other posts i described what I did mean by levels of consciousness, they are ascention levels. like levels that exist abouve this reality. the force is such a level, if you believed in it you woujld know this. however I assumed you did, sorry. if yo dont believe in it why do you come here and talk to people that do believe in it?

Thanks, Omhu. I guess some of my... attitude in that post was grown out of what short history there already was in this thread and other recent ones. I have tried the "I don't understand, would you kindly elaborate?" tone of voice several times already and to no avail, and though I'm sure you have read most of those occasions, probably not every reader has and in an effort to present a more welcoming spirit I should try and keep a fresh, charitable, and patient tone.

To address something substantive though, I'm not sure that this is a matter of having or not having experienced "it" unless and until we can fix what we mean by "it" in the first place. More often than not I find that people will just presume that they are talking the same language but make no effort to verify it even on a superficial level. If you had your experience, that's fair enough, but until someone reports to you not just that they had "it", too, but what exactly it was that they experienced, how can you have any confidence that you are talking about the same thing? And that's assuming that two people couldn't have possibly had the same sort of fluke and that what ever the two of you experienced was an experience of anything real beyond self-deception... Imagine you wake up from a dream, ask someone if they saw "it", and they just said yes. Why on earth would you think that the two of you had the same dream if neither of you make any effort to describe at least some outline of what the dream contained? It'd be dubious enough to call it a "vision" even if you did share a dream, but declaring it to be one without any confirmation of even this flimsy sort is completely incomprehensible to me. It's not a conflict between the privileged who were granted the special knowledge and the lowly mortals that were not, it's a matter of basic communication and any measure of critical thinking whatsoever...

To borrow from an analogy that keeps coming up here quite a lot, it is like the blind men touching different parts of an elephant in the hopes of identifying the beast. Except this time they don't even declare what they think they were touching, they just gather up in a circle after, nodding understandingly at each other, pretending like they can see their respective fellows' nods. And then after they each walk home tripping over every other blade of grass, and report to their worried wives that their eyesight had at last returned.

Fyxe wrote: you dear gist, said I presumped people here believed in the force

No, I did not. Read again.

by that I take it to mean that you do not believe in the force.

Yes, you presumed what I said when I didn't say it, and then you presume what I meant by what you presumed I said.

why is that so hard to figure out? Is it not a valid assuming to thing people here, at the jedi teimple, woujld believe in the force?

If this was a genuine question, one of the dozen or so times different people have answered it to you would have actually stuck. If you care not to read, then I needn't care to write.

by explore I mean talk about, that is also what I am doing, or trying to do anyway. and if you read my other posts i described what I did mean by levels of consciousness, they are ascention levels. like levels that exist abouve this reality.

So when I speak of a shmeluffin and you ask me to describe it, and I say it is a glarbadaythe that can also sometimes jibemtirate, I doubt you'd think of that as much of an explanation either. I don't know what "ascention levels" are any more than I did what "levels of consciousness" are nor any more than you understand what a "glarbadaythe" is supposed to be. The way we understand a thing is by appreciating how it relates to others, particularly how it differs from others. Even if you only ever had rabbits and frogs described to you, you may fail to correctly identify each of them individually, but if the descriptions were any good at all, you will likely never mistake the frog for a strange unique hairless and slimy-skinned version of a rabbit because that will be one of the lines drawn between them for you by those descriptions.

So, what is a "level of consciousness"? How do I know it when I see one? What are they like, or what do they do, by what defintion do I know that you aren't talking about rabbits? They are "like levels htat exist abouve this reality", you say, but what is that supposed to mean, though?

the force is such a level, if you believed in it you woujld know this. however I assumed you did, sorry. if yo dont believe in it why do you come here and talk to people that do believe in it?

Oh yes, feed me more of thine wisdom, master.
See, it's moments like this that make me question why I should be any sort of nice with you... You already know it all, so what's the point? You ask why I spend any time discussing things, so I ask you back, since you already swallowed all the wisdom of the world by the bloody shovel loads, why do you waste any time with lowly peasants like yours truly, who don't even know the first thing about knowing it all the way True Believers^TM like yourself do?

Thank you for the response, Gisteron. It was thoughtful and I appreciate it.

As I read through the dialog between you and Fyxe, I am finding myself reading posts from both of you and thinking "Yeah, I can see how they'd feel that way." Call it empathy or over-empathy, but I'm finding it easy to take both perspectives, despite the contradiction.

I do agree that a more precise definition of "levels of consciousness" would be helpful to this conversation. So, I'm going to give it a try, though the language here may still be too imprecise for anyone who demands objective, measurable definitions. Consider this just a starting point, maybe, if it needs to be rendered still more precise. Some terms are based in a specific religious orientation, so full objectivity may require that they be replaced.

My go-to source for an issue like this is the Hindu teacher Paramahansa Yogananda. His description of levels of consciousness shared below - perhaps in part more philosophical and poetic than scientific - still might provide an increase in the specificity of what we are discussing here. Here are the levels of consciousness he describes:

Cosmic consciousness: The consciousness of God that is beyond all creation.

Christ consciousness: When Cosmic Consciousness comes into the realm of matter—into each of the atoms that make up the planets and island universes, and the different forms of plant, animal, and human life — that Consciousness is called Christ Consciousness.

Super consciousness: When Christ Consciousness descends into the soul and pure mind of man, it is called superconsciousness. Actually our human consciousness is Cosmic Consciousness, bottled up in a phial of flesh, corked with ignorance, and floating isolated in the ocean of Spirit.

Subconsciousness: When superconsciousness descends into the realm of imagination, it is called subconsciousness.

Waking consciousness: When subconsciousness descends into the muscular and sensory phase of human life, it is called human or waking consciousness.

Worldly consciousness: When waking consciousness becomes attached to the senses and material things, it is called worldly consciousness,

Evil consciousness: When waking consciousness is used to harm oneself or others, it is evil consciousness.

I hope that's a helpful start. It's probably not perfect, where a fully objective definition is desired; the whole chain traces back to an undescribed "consciousness" and to God, which themselves are undefined. But maybe it's sufficient to lend direction to the conversation somehow.

Fyxe wrote: you dear gist, said I presumped people here believed in the force and by that I take it to mean that you do not believe in the force. why is that so hard to figure out?

Probably because Gist never said that and, even if he had, you're logic is still flawed.

Let's pretend that Gist had said you were wrong to presume that people here believe in the force (which he didn't). That simply implies that Gist does not believe everyone here believes in the force. It says absolutely nothing about his own beliefs on the matter of the force.

Fyxe wrote: Is it not a valid assuming to thing people here, at the jedi teimple, woujld believe in the force?

It probably is a valid assumption to think people here would believe in the force (if that's what you meant to ask?), but you know what they say happens when you assume...