Leo Gura

@Maxx A horse is a horse of course, of course. No one is claiming it's a unicorn. It's just a hallucinated horse. You asking questions and being perplexed about why a hallucinated horse doesn't behave like a unicorn is a problem of your own creation. You imposed that ridiculous assumption, and now you're confused about it. Of course! Stop doing that. BEING implies no particular way of behaving. You can realize that reality is a hallucination, and go right back to walking your dog, opening your mail, chopping wood, eating Cheetos. The TRUTH is irrelevant to life within the hallucination. That's the whole point of LIBERATION. You are liberated to do whatever you wanna do. And survival in this hallucination has certain demands like food, water, shelter, sex, etc. If you really wish to entirely transcend the self-survival instinct -- for shits and giggles -- you can. Become so enlightened your body falls dead. Then your wish will come true. That's what Mahavira decided to do, and countless others. He just went into the forest and quietly starved himself to death. The hallucinated horse will fall dead no matter what. Because all hallucinations are temporary. Hallucinations behave exactly as human beings behave! They spend most of their time struggling to survive, because they don't really exist. The reason you struggle so much is not because you are real, but precisely because you are unreal! The problem here is that you're failing to make a paradigm shift. You're still trying to evaluate the nondual paradigm from the dual paradigm, which obviously looks silly, as you've pointed out. Empty your cup first.

@Juan Cruz Giusto It's no accident you don't agree. That's the only thing separating duality from nonduality. You are grossly underestimating this thing called "enlightenment".

@Maxx David Hume answered your question best: This is basic basic stuff guys. Come on. I thought you were more advanced than this. This should be Kindergarten stuff for you

All distinctions are illusion! Hello??? What do you think NONDUALITY means? Lol ONE, as in not two. Not distinct. Everything distinct is relative!

I see a lot of folks here triggered by this notion of "hallucination". Good... that means your web of belief is being disrupted. Definition of hallucination from Google: "an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present." That is PRECISELY, EXACTLY, LITERALLY what all of reality is. Something which is nothing. Stop arguing about nonsense and go self-inquire (or do some 5-MeO) and see for yourselves. Hallucination = Illusion = A Dream = Maya = Idealism = Infinite Mind = Enlightenment = God = I AM = The Self = No Self = Nirvana = Buddha = Christ = Shiva = Shakti = Void = Reality = Truth = Absolute = The One = Nonduality = Duality = Being = Infinity = Consciousness = The Dao = Mu Ya'll got some silly notions of enlightenment. "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." -- Edgar Allan Poe

That is right. Socrates supposedly opposed written works because they were too dry and rigid, possibly misleading people with theory. He preferred one-on-one exchanges so he could adapt this questioning to yours. It does seem he was a self-inquirer. Not sure how far he got. The best evidence for his possible enlightenment was the calm and collected manner in which he took his execution. After drinking the poison, he started to feel it taking effect in this body. He closed his eyes to die as all his friends watched in horror. Then he opened his eyes suddenly and said something along the lines of, "Oh, friends. Can one of you please repay my debt to this town's person? I owe him one chicken. It would be a shame if my death robbed him of what he is owed." And then he died.

@Geromekevin You're conflating relative knowledge with understanding of the Absolute. The Absolute is more like not-knowing. All human knowledge is extinguished and made irrelevant by its infinite radiance. Wanting to cure cancer and all that is just self-survival. It has nothing to do with Absolute Truth. Scientific knowledge is infinite. It will never end.

Watch out for your assumptions. I am not making appeals to "spiritual masters" as dogma or putting them on pedestals. It's quite clear that hardcore meditators and advanced yoga practitioners with 30-40 years of experience have way deeper mastery of this stuff than Martin and have seen things and can do things which Martin may not be able to imagine. I have enough experience and foresight to tell the difference. Just because I have a friendly interview with someone doesn't mean I agree with everything they say, or that their views are the end-all-be-all. Why would you make Martin Ball the arbiter of things? Nonduality is not the only thing in question here. Lol, and just how am I supposed to act if reality is a hallucination? Should I be wearing a clown hat and running naked around the streets? Just because it's a hallucination, doesn't mean anything behavioral. Your hand would still burn if you stick in the fire. That's all part of the hallucination. The problem is that people hear "hallucination" and they get silly images in their mind of "anything goes". Like you can walk through walls and eat poison and nothing will happen. No, shit will happen. If "you get shot in the head", the hallucination called "your life" will "end". If you want to understand the entirety of the spiritual domain, you're gonna need a much more openminded and inquiring attitude. Picking one person and following everything they say it not gonna cut it. I have a meta-approach. I study and cross-reference dozens of sources and schools against my own experiences and deductions. Anyways, investigate for yourself. Any advanced practitioner will tell you reality is a hallucination. I'm not saying anything new. There are WAY more incredible things than that to discover.

@Haumea He didn't leave behind any written work because most philosophers of his time did not. Philosophy was lived and practiced and spoken, not written down at that time. That doesn't make him enlightened.

Don't be so sure about that. I've yet to see any credible evidence that they were enlightened. Don't forget that Greeks consumed mushrooms, LSD, and God only knows what other kinds of psychedelics. And mystical experiences do not constitute enlightenment.

@Maxx Yes, of course, because the mind is wired for survival in this hallucination. To unwire that tendency requires 40 years of practice. But, A) It is possible. B) It doesn't change the fact that it's a hallucination. Any good scientist will tell you that there is no biological or physical reason why your child is more important than a starving child in Africa. And yet, if we put a gun to the scientist's child's head vs an African child, he will always tell you to pull the trigger on the African child. Such is the force of self-survival. It doesn't care about facts, logic, reality, truth, equality, or fairness. Its job is to actively disregard the truth that you and your entire worldview is a construction. Its purpose is purely pragmatic. It doesn't care if your child is a hallucination, it will defend that hallucination tooth and nail. That's what egos do. They fudge reality so you can keep hallucinating your existence. Your entire existence depends on your hallucinating that you're not hallucinating.

New video idea: How To Get A Hot Troll Girlfriend Hint: Go to Iceland

@PetarKa That's well and good, but if you're talking about life purpose, it must reach beyond merely yourself. Obviously everyone's purpose is to raise their own consciousness. But what is your purpose with respect to your contribution to the world? What are you gonna do once your consciousness has been raised to the point where you cease to exist? If my purpose was to only raise my own consciousness, I would tell ya'll to fuck off and I'd go live in a cabin in the woods.

Trolls are silent and wise. They know all is illusion

Good for you!

@Ilya They are not different things! Stop putting the cart before the horse. You cannot understand calculus before you learn arithmetic. You are Absolute Infinity RIGHT NOW! Sit down and realize this is so. That is the only way.

@youngshinzen Of course a conceptual framework is not required. In fact, it is best to have zero conceptual framework, but in today's world, that's a tall order to fill in practice so the right framework is better than a wrong framework. You can experience the Absolute at any moment no matter who you are or what you believe. It is Absolute after all. It's the one thing that's always true and present. How you access it can vary greatly. It could be through a hash cookie, or a butterfly landing on your nose, or a traumatic car crash, or for no reason at all as you're walking down the street. The problem is not that people have no framework. It's that they have very wrong frameworks which leave their cups too full to experience the Absolute.

@Juan Cruz Giusto We're talking about the same thing basically. It's just a matter of tracing all the fine details out. Re: "You are for sure dead" Don't be so sure about that The whole problem here is that we're using convention-reality labels like "dead", "zen master", "gun", "I pull a gun on you". All of these labels are thrown into question at deeper levels of consciousness. The whole trick is that it's impossible to evaluate a paradigm without first fully stepping out of your own, and then into the other one. If you actually did start to see trolls on a regular basis, you might not consider them "merely subjective ego delusions" as you presently do from your current paradigm. To a real Zen master, there is no such thing as a Zen master.

Yes, consistency is the difference. The question is, why it is a meaningful difference to you? To me, it is not. It's a relative bias people have. Just because a thing is more consistent, doesn't mean much in my book. It's quite obvious to me that "ordinary physical reality" is no more real than a dream. I don't care how consistent it is. All that does is make it a more believable illusion. This is quite clearly acknowledged by advanced meditators and in many spiritual traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism. The consistency of ordinary reality will start to break down as you get deeper and deeper into meditation, until eventually the notion will entirely break down. It's not that reality will become inconsistent, but your paradigm will change so much that conventional reality will fly out the window. For an advanced Zen master, for example, when he blinks his eyes, the entire world is destroyed and re-created. There is no object-permanence. And if you learn to astral travel, you can be inside totally different realities for long periods of time, such that ordinary reality just becomes one of many realities you can inhabit. Martin Ball is a great guy. Nothing against him. But an advanced spiritual master he is not. Like I said many times before, there is way more to spirituality than enlightenment.

Yes, he was a dick. Don't be like that.

@hundreth Yes, I know exactly what you meant. I've experienced that kind of magical, playful energy on shrooms, and it is still very healing, life changing, and many insights come. But then there's the really deep existential insights, which is what I was trying to direct you towards in future trips.

This is an artificial distinction. You assume some kind of objective external world which doesn't actually exist. When you're looking at the zoo animals, you're just in a mass hallucination. And even so, your hallucination of the animals is still subjective. There is really no such thing a "objective". And psychedelic visions are not random. They have consistent themes and patterns across people and cultures. Giving a privileged positions to ordinary reality vs non-ordinary reality is just a bias IMO.

Yes... this is one the problems with psychedelics. They make you so excited, so intoxicated with the magical new phenomena, that you lose track of the deepest questions. Nothing wrong with that for a first trip. But in the future, when you really wanna get some work done, try sitting very still the whole time and contemplating. It won't be as fun and playful, but you will accomplish more. The reason many people miss the awesome power of psychedelics is that they do them in social settings, where the situation quickly devolves into a carnival of fun, running around, talking, doing pranks, sex, etc. No contemplation actually happens.

@phoenix666 Replace heavy metal with soft jazz flute, and your enlightenment will be immanent

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