Non-belief and Nihilism

phatboy writes:Explain to me why there can be no gray area in between? I, for one am an absolute Monotheist. It seems to me that some people are professing Christians, yet they deny Inerrency and somehow have a different idea of God than I do. They still claim Christianity, yet seemingly fail to bow to Christ. Or perhaps they fail to bow to MY idea of Christ.

This sounds like a lot of gobbledy-gook to me. Can you explain it plain langauge?

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.
This profoundly disturbed me, because I had had several kensho or satori-like experiences (glimpses of One Taste), but they were all confined to the waking state. Moreover, most of the things I cared for existed in the waking state. And yet clearly the waking state is not permanent. It comes and goes every twenty-four hours. And yet, according to the great sages, there is something in us that is always conscious-that is, literally conscious or aware at all times and through all states, waking, dreaming, sleeping. And that ever-present awareness is Spirit in us. That underlying current of constant consciousness (or nondual awareness) is a direct and unbroken ray of pure Spirit itself. It is our connection with the Goddess, our pipeline straight to God.
Thus, if we want to realize our supreme identity with Spirit, we will have to plug ourselves into this current of constant consciousness, and follow it through all changes of state-waking, dreaming, sleeping. This will: 1) strip us of an exclusive identification with any of those states (such as the body, the mind, the ego, or the soul); and 2) allow us to recognize and identify with that which is constant-or timeless-through all of those states, namely, Consciousness as Such, by any other name, timeless Spirit.
http://www.shambhalasun.com/...mnists/Wilber/WilberJan99.htm

I feel like I'm spreading my cognitive tracks all over the board these days.

I think the fact that you can often tell people are inhibiting response by their failure to inhibit unconscious responses (e.g. lie detector test, eye movement, twitch) shows that inhibition doesn't necessarily work on unconscious movement.

There is also blind sight, but those are unconscious which means we don't get to be conscious of them.

The inhibition I'm talking about is when you know you want to call someone a name and stifle that impulse for example.

One question occurs to me is do we know how much of the brain's functioning is conscious?

Hedonism is a perfectly reasonable kind of nihilism.