Here is where I would think your and Navarre’s confusion arises.

In your every experience up until now, words have likely been used within the context of your ‘operating system’. As we usually utilize words in this operating system, they serve to break the world into pieces and then attempt to relate those pieces to each other. We might argue endlessly about whether such divisions are real, arbitrary, or relevant, but these will all be questions within the context of our operating system.

This entire site is about something else entirely. It is about scrapping your current operating system and seeing what remains.

This is not just confusing for the two of you. Everyone who comes to this site must confront their usual habits of objectifying and relating the world. Eventually, they hopefully figure out that the words on this site are not attempting to define relationships or to describe reality. Instead, words are used in a totally different way — as an attempt to point our perception toward something which words have difficulty in describing (much as words cannot adequately capture what you mean by ‘the taste of chocolate’.).

If you wake up each morning and live out each day untouched by anxiety, stress, confusion, or frustration, then your current operating system is functioning perfectly for you, and this site has nothing to offer. If you feel that something is ‘not quite right’ in your life or in the world, then this site is challenging you to observe your operating system in action. Not to just think ‘about things’, but to observe the thinking process itself, and learn how your mind works at its most foundational level.

This observation is perhaps most difficult for those of us who have highly refined versions of our current operating system. We have become so accustomed to solving our problems via the system that it seems either ludicrous or impossible that we could function without it.

If this still isn’t making sense, I’d suggest that you read the article ‘Everything You Hear About Enlightenment is a Lie‘.

Sweetwater,

Kenton

“However, if we can clearly see that linear time is simply another creation of this same system of thought”

Maybe, though entropy seems to prove that arrow of time is not a human construct.

“In fact, if we look honestly, we’ll find that any definition we use to indicate what a peanut is and what a peanut isn’t is actually pretty arbitrary.”

I disagree, in the same fashion that i disagree that color is arbitrary in that a red apple is red because of the specific frequencies of light it reflects. What if I define a peanut by it’s DNA?

“Looking about, the world is seen Just As Is, with no painting-over of our usual strange ideas.”

And, to throw some more confusion into the mix, just to keep it interesting, is whether or not you can trust the sense that are showing you that way things are Just As Is. Taking into account various illusions, how the brain compensates for your blind spot, and other phenomena, it is clear that your brain interprets all your sensory information before you even get a chance to ‘think’ about it, your conscious mind anyways.

-Doug

Thanks for pointing this out. Logic was never really a strong point of mine

As you’ve probably gathered, this article (indeed, all the articles on this site), is not intended as a proof of anything or even as a description of how things are or aren’t. Instead, words are here used to point us toward something which words can’t adequately describe.

What’s interesting to observe here is how our logic shapes our ideas of the world. In this instance, you point out a temporal difference in distinguishing the definitions of ‘need’. This makes sense when we’re locked into the context our words and our usual mindset create for us, and thus we see a fallacy in the thinking process.

However, if we can clearly see that linear time is simply another creation of this same system of thought, we find that we’re using our own creation to support our own creation. In other words, we’re confusing our words with reality, and miss out on seeing what’s right in front of us in favor of focusing on our imaginations. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but when we realize our confusion we are no longer limited by the rather constrictive thought-systems we’ve created.

Indeed, the entire idea of ‘need’, or of relationship of any sort, depends on an entire system of ideas which few of us have ever examined. If we can truly find separate objects in the world around us, need and relationship make sense. But if we truly see what’s right there, outside our beliefs, then we discover that need and relationship are something entirely different than we previously thought.

Sweetwater,

Kenton