To put it in other terms: the straw rationalist becomes cognitively fused with their worldview, and the postrationalist does not. Even when one believes that one is not fused with a worldview, there is almost always a cognitive fusion with one’s metaphysics going on. It’s what gives rise to one’s very experience of reality in the first place.
monktastic
Karma: 2
Thanks for the feedback! I moved it to the intro and added some stuff.
Here’s a sort of amalgamation: imagine if it were somehow literally the case that the ground of being were pure infinite love, and its job was to birth entire realities into existence, to give it a way to know itself from infinitely many perspectives. Now imagine rediscovering this truth, from the perspective of that primordial, atemporal being-ness, and watching that process evolve into the experience you normally think of as “being me.”
The “climate crisis,” aka the destruction of the biosphere.
By itself it should not convince you that you’re dreaming. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a lucid dream, but often they are triggered by an oddity that you (for some reason) decide to take seriously in a particular way. A green dragon may prompt you to introspect in that way, but only if you don’t accept the mind’s trick offering. At that point it does become possible to know that you are dreaming.
Oops—that was an accidental inclusion of part of a draft. I’ll remove it. Still, let me try to explain where it was going.
Various things can happen in your dream that might spur you to consider that you are dreaming. A green dragon may fly through the sky, or a dream character may tell you “you’re dreaming!” In either case, the mind can quickly generate a very convincing explanation: “duh, green dragons always come on Tuesdays.”
If you had your daytime rationality available, you could see through this deception. But you don’t, and similarly, in our normal waking state, we lack the cognitive ability that would reveal the dreamlike nature of this reality. “Yes, I have no reason to believe in a past, but duh, it’s true anyway because ….”
Thanks for commenting!
He’s very clear about metaphysics just being “mind-stuff” and irrelevant to genuine awakening. He doesn’t talk about the stuff that might be considered “unscientific” (e.g., that would fall under the category of psi) because he realizes that it would distract people from awakening (some of them by being too interested in it, and others averse).