An historical quote: "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." ~ Buddha
Have read this thread with interest now,
@Tyger, and responding to this last quotation from the Buddha is good place to express how your thread's main direction is related to questions and issues we've explored in the 'Consciousness and Paranormal' thread. There our primary goal has been to follow developments in understanding what consciousness
is and
does that have been realized in the interdisciplinary field of Consciousness Studies still forging forward after thirty years. At many points in that thread we have focused on ontological questions, as we are doing again there at present. The core question in that discussion is: what can we learn about the nature of 'reality' as we experience it in our time and place that might reveal the meaning/significance of consciousness in the universe/cosmos as a whole -- that is, can we think our way to comprehending 'What-Is' in Being as an integrated Whole by understanding how 'what-is' in our world, the world of our own being, becomes experienced and known?
In the phenomenological approach I follow it is necessary to explore how consciousness arises in life, in
lived being on the planet we inhabit, since what we can claim to 'know' about the local world and ourselves as present in it arises out of the grounds of our being-here. So, in phenomenology, ontology must address the primordial 'awareness' that evolves into protoconsciousness and consciousness in the evolution of species of life. And that awareness must be recognized to be 'bi-polar', consisting of both objective and subjective poles of the being of 'what-is' in the experience of lived being.
I am drawn to the insights of Buddhism that lead to profound respect for the boundaries that exist between the self and the other, lead to the gentleness of Buddhists felt and expressed toward the smallest of creatures. It is an impulse like that which Heidegger expressed in the phrase he focused on in his later writings: "Let Being Be," recognizing the vast disparity that exists between what we personally or culturally want our being and our world's being to be, what we want to bring about out of the vast but mute processes in Being that have brought about the circumstances within which we must live, within which we attempt to make our way justly, morally, in the physicality of 'what-is' here and now in our time and place.
Because I have not read enough of the Buddhist texts and teachings, I no doubt do not have a sufficient understanding of the concept of 'Maya', the notion that all that we see and sense in our existence is an illusion. But it seems to me that it is a leap in essential logic to believe that our lived experiences are illusions, that the local world in which we live in the present is 'unreal' and that somehow we are or should become capable of changing it by an act of the mind. For the suffering we experience and see others experiencing, as well as the satisfactions and joys we likewise experience in being-here and recognize others to experience, can't be swept away without denying the experiential grounds out of which our thinking itself arises. As I see it, the growth and development -- the evolution -- of awareness, consciousness, and mind in the history of our own species is evidence for me that life and its capabilities to sense and gradually understand the nature of being --
of our being and the being of the things that are in the world we exist in -- plainly signify that what we feel and what we think constitute, within a physical mileau, 'what-is' for us and for all aware beings, and what we must call 'reality'.
So I cannot agree that any of us, much less all of us, can and should pursue attempts to deny the complex reality in which we have our existence such as I sense in the ideas and methods propagated by the 'Abrahams' as expressed in the last video you linked. I can understand why many people would hope to persuade themselves that they can individually erase the reality that belongs to all of us, for better and for worse, by an act of personal, mental, will. But I don't think that doing so is productive for the work we humans are obliged to do {'appropriated by Being' to do, as Heidegger expressed it} in the worlds in which we must find ways to exist beneficently among and with one another, to do no harm to others. As Camus wrote, "the only mistake is to cause suffering."
No doubt consciousness as we experience it here and now requires a balancing act given all the inconsistencies, conflicts, and interpersonal outrages we see expressed in our current world and the incoherence that results for us in attempting to 'make sense' of the world and ourselves. We can't control most of what happens in our own lives, much less in the world at large, and so efforts to stabilize one's emotions and mind are necessary. But we can't change the world, reality as what-is in our experience, by a personally willed fiat. Our situation requires us "to be / in the difficulty of what it is to be," as Wallace Stevens expressed it.