Dual & Non-Dual same (but different) ..

It’s about the non-local consciousness as pure non duality .. i.e. that which is beyond words .. no-thing .. nothing .. Emptiness or God .. Brahman .. The Absolute .. whatever one chooses to call it ..

Let’s call it Universal Mind for now .. the brain as reciever .. through that the absolute non-dual consciousness gets filtered into duality ..

Actual Reality is all one thing .. but our filtering brain sees it as two contrasting poles which make up dualistic consciousness .. hence time and space .. past and future .. here and there .. and all other dualities ..

All the methods are in order to ‘trip the switch’ of dualistic perception and get back to a state prior to this .. which is like Universal Mind .. when this is done a third state comes in which the dual is realised as the non-dual .. that all the composites of dual mind are composed of nothing but Universal Mind one might say .. Both poles of any pair of opposites not only have the same source but actually are the same source ..

Therefore the wonderful saying ..

The world is an illusion .. only Brahman is real ..

The world is Brahman.

Which is why I almost feel to ‘correct’ that imperfectly stated thing in a thread which says .. Brahman is the World ..

I see that as different from The world is Brahman .. as in, the world is not other than Brahman but Brahman is not defined as being the world

I maybe even still find it hard to see emptiness is form .. but easy to see form is emptiness .. (in other words emptiness is a vast emptiness and there is nothing other than it .. and all form is nothing other than emptiness but emptinesss is not defined by the sum of all form .. and far from that )

In more sufi language .. the world is not other than God .. (because nothing truly exists except God) .. but He is not defined by the world .. as He is its creator and therefore much more than that .. creating unimagined worlds with qualities & beings we cannot possibly imagine ..

So the world is an illusion, Allah alone is Real .. the world is not other than Allah .. would sum that up

and translate as ..

The world is an illusion .. Brahman alone is real .. the world is Brahman, in the sense that the world is not other than Brahman ..

I see the world as an illusion created out of whatever ultimate reality is (call it God or Brahman or maybe even Emptiness) .. and not other than that in essence .. but caused or ‘created’ by or through the filtering mechanism of the mind / the brain / dualistic consciousness .. interpreting universal mind or pure non-dual, non-local consciousness.

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Lisa asked  "What is the source of thoughts .... ?"  and this is my attempt at a reply ...

If consciousness .. pure non-dual consciousness existed before anything else .. something that is absolutely beyond imagination and absolutely no thing .. maybe call it God or Brahman or an aspect of one of those .. and out of that very no-thing was produced the universe and all that is in it and of it in a material sense .. and part of that material universe is this strange creature called the human being (wether created evolved or however ‘caused’) then that original no-thing, pure consciousness .. which might be called Universal Mind existed before during and after the material existence ..

If that kind of consciousness is found in NDEs wherein most of the limitations of space and time are transcended and the more ‘elastic’ consciousness is found to exist at a time when the brain is apparently ‘dead’ (flatlining) .. then this is a strong underpinning of the idea that consciousness is non-local and certainly not accounted for by brain activity. It makes the brain rather look like a ‘reciever’ for consciousness .. and that the signals .. or consciousness received are not only from a vast universal source without limitations of space and time .. but also .. that they get ‘filtered’ in a special way so that ‘reality’ can be understood or percieved in terms of poles of opposites spatially, like near and far, high and low left & right and sensually, like  wet and dry, hot and cold , hard & soft etc etc .. and temporally as in past and present thus making up our percieved reality .. or the ‘illusion’ that we live in through dualistic consciousness. What has been known as the play of ‘maya’.

Universal mind or non-dual consciousness which is non-local consciousness is therefore the reality and ‘source’ of thoughts .. the receiving of consciousness  and shaping it into dualistic pairs and compartmentalising them and interpreting them through sensory apparatus is the job of the brain ..

So I would say the ‘source’ of thoughts is Universal Mind or non-dual consciousness .. the appearance of them is in the brain due to the filtering process ..

After that the attaching of conceptual thought to our bodies and the identification of our ‘selves’ with thought occurs .. apparently thus severing us from the original non-dual consciousness which may be regarded as our ‘real’ selves.

Thoughts ‘bubble up’ endlessly in our minds because non-dual consciousness is endless .. boundless & non-local .. ‘We’ don’t ‘think a thought’ because thoughts are merely filtered universal consciousness and .. as is known and has been seen ‘we’ are a fiction of dualistic consciousness and thought anyway ..