WindInTheLeaf

Point your finger at the moon and everyone will see a different finger, but no one will see the moon.

The opposite might as well be true. The more information readily available the easier it is for the ego to stay alive. All these ideas about what one must do to become enlightened is perhaps the biggest obstacle to enlightenment. And imagine if you've had some sort of awakening experience. Now you don't quite understand what it was, and you go on the internet to find some kind of explanation, some kind of certainty. In doing so you might lead yourself away from where you were well on your way towards. Now you believe that what you experienced and what you must do, is something other than what you experienced and what you were intuitively inclined to do. Our knowledge may act as a parachute, to make the fall towards absolute zero less painful, but all along the way down the ego blows air into the parachute to keep you going in circles at whatever altitude you might find yourself at.

Enlightenment does not solve your problems, only the idea of there being any problems. So you will still face the 'problems' of everyday life, but without perceiving them as problems. This makes it much easier to deal with what needs to be dealt with, as you won't suffer by having to deal with it, but it does not remove the things that needs to be dealt with.

Or something like that. Now don't hold on to the idea that you must let go, that could take you into all kinds of trouble. Let go of even the idea that you must let go. Just be. Be what? Just be. Doesn't matter who you are, just that you are you. Then the whole self-actualization happens by itself.

Letting go is the same as surrendering. You don't let go of emotions, problems, attachments etc. as you would let go of something solid in your hand, but let go in the sense that you allow whatever arises to arise. It is sticky, and part of your being. Letting go is a process of allowing what you previously repressed, letting your guard down and surrendering to what you previously fought.

If you expect to awaken every day, no wonder you remain asleep. Yet the ego is sneaky, defending its position by whispering tales of more. Shhh, can you hear? The ego-ghost spewing lies of fear! Uoooouuuhh, you are not complete wuooohuuhuh you must find enlightenment, you are not already it auooowuuueue there lies something outside of this! Yet, without the ego our nights would be dull and quiet. Welcome it when it knocks at your door and rattles its chains, listen to its story dont shut it out, it only tries to show you what you went by too fast to notice. When all its whispers are acknowledged it seizes to be until it has more stories to tell or you stop tricking yourself into chasing after yourself.

Passions are loops of a sort, where you find something that keeps your attention hooked for repetition. It is natural to look for 'loops' while in the process of becoming self-less, as the ego struggles with letting go. Contemplate whether you are attempting to find a passion within/(as part of) the 'maze' that you are trying to escape. The surge of energy you feel whenever your attention shifts toward personal development is perhaps a clue to where your passion/calling lies.

Any answer given would prove there to be other perspectives, would it not? Perhaps ask the opposite question: could there ever exist only one perspective?

If you feel you have moved too fast for too long, it is time to take a break and catch your breath.

Maybe it's not hell. Maybe it's the opposite.

Just be the light for them to better read the pages in the dark. Don't teach, but help them teach themselves to become themselves by being yourself.

@Shin how can we be sure suffering is unnecessary?

Those who searches for enlightenment as if it is some buried treasure, embark on an endless search. They believe, that if they just find the right thing to point their awareness to, they will become enlightened. Enlightenment is a state of lack of content, in a way. For there to be some 'thing' / aka content, there has to be duality by thought. Something the ego can hold on to, for it to stay alive. What you will find, when you no longer hold on to any particular thing in your awareness is beyond words, as to experience it words/thought must be left at the gate.

If your mental response to the social environment you are in is "motherfucker get away from me", which remains as a 'mental response' - as in it does not get actualized through action -, then no wonder you feel depressed. You seem to resist the change that is guiding you down the stream to a place where people are on the same frequency as you. Most, if not everyone, on this path goes through where you are currently at, in some form or another. The ego struggles every step of the way, to keep you stuck in loops you have spiritually outgrown. It's like that period, as you were growing up, where your feet had outgrown your shoes but you still wore them around - because, as mom said: you cannot already have outgrown your shoes, we almost just bought them! So you go through each day with pain in your feet, believing that mom was right. You start doubting yourself, and further down the line you end up where you are now, where you feel the pain of contradiction keeping you in circles that no longer fits you. You naturally feel tired, exhausted even, from going through what you are currently going through. Like a ship having altered its course, the winds that were previously in your favor are now against you, trying to keep you stuck in a bermudas triangle of the social seas, where you now recognize the small-talk for what it is. You have woken up in that particular dream, gone lucid, and can now see the hell that used to hide behind 'normality', 'every-day life' etc. But since change has taken place in your 'inner' before the 'outer' you now find yourself as a stranger to what was once home. Like a drop of water in a desert you quickly perish to become desert once more. My advice would be to let go, you are fucking tired, so just let go. You are not weird, you have woken up to realize how weird everything is. Whatever now seems to draw you, let it become your new reality.

Of course they point to the same thing, but why do you want to know what you already know you cannot know?

You raise a very important question. The absolute cannot be realized from any position.'Any position/experience of 'I' in relation to the absolute' isthe absolute, as i believe @Serotoninluv was saying. For 'the absolute' to be realized by thought, thought would have to know itself. This is impossible, like a hand trying to grasp itself or a painter trying to paint himself painting himself.... Any movement of thought is a movement of the absolute, and thus thought-about-absolute must seize for the absolute to be realized. But thought is not really a problem, as any loop of thought-about-absolute is the absolute being absolutely perfect - without lacking anything to make it 'better'. What is gained from less to no thought is a lightness of being.

Imagine that you, as an 'I' of some sort (doesn't matter how we draw the lines and if we even agree on what 'I' really is), is floating in an ocean that is 'the other'(universe, consciousness, energy, spirit etc.). Now, you were in the ocean before you learned to swim, and you have had to find out how to by yourself. Naturally you have ended up deeply entangled in the ocean, that is you are deep underwater going in loops. You cannot remember when you were above the water, and you have just invented a way of swimming/being in the ocean that feels sort of right by 'winging it' and comparing yourself to other swimmers doing their thing and copying those who seem to have it all figured out while avoiding those who seems like they are drowning. The further below the surface the higher the force of the waters above, so naturally you would want to be as close to the surface as possible. You might, at some point start realizing that 'I' and 'other', 'ocean' and 'not-ocean', are like to sides of the same thing, and that the more you struggle the more struggle you get. You may start to realize that the problems you try to solve are created mostly by yourself. The more problems you let go of the lighter you get, and start floating towards the surface. Every step along the way up is held back by the noise of the past, so that to reach total quietness and stillness that allows you to get to the surface, you'll have to go through a lifetime of misconceptions. All along the way you'll be pointed in the right direction, but the deeper you are the less light there'll naturally be, so the finger is often mistaken for that which is pointed to; the map gets mistaken for the territory. This is made much more difficult, as you have no idea which finger is the right one to follow, and everyone, those stuck in the same part of the whirlpool and those at higher levels, seem to think they know all there is to know. As you are in a sort of whirlpool, the way to the surface is like a spiral, where every step is a new loop that persists till it dissolves to make room for the next loop and so on until the surface is reached. The more movement of thought, the deeper down you'll be and the faster the whirlpool will spin. Every swimmer is stuck in their own kind of spiral, that is just a version of an 'arche-spiral' (the different colors of 'spiral dynamics'), that is a loop of thought. The closer to the surface the quieter the mind gets, and therefore the loops of thought gets harder to see through/spot. If every swimmer along the way, at every stage of the spiraling whirlpool, is basically holding himself there by attachment to a certain thought-loop that is founded by unresolved noise of the past, then someone at the surface, if he wishes, can dive down and step into that part of the whirlpool and attempt to dissolve the struggling swimmers thought-loop little by little. This is where the conceptual ideas of nonduality(nonduality is what we attempt to realize as it is essentially the surface we wish to reach) has their place. But one must recognize that different people needs to hear different things at different stages of their personal development. What is wise words to one may be foolish to another. Nonduality as an idea can be used to get people towards the surface, and show them the outlines of that nondual state on the other side, but it can never be reached as long as it is thought of. To reach it, to breach the surface and reach 'absolute truth', one must let go of thought about 'absolute truth'. You can never escape the whirlpool as long as you think, as the whirlpool is essentially thought.

Nonduality is sort of the ending of paradigms, as it contains all paradigms. When we speak of it we try to explain that which lies beyond explanation, and attempt to guide thought to its end. It's like we are helping each-other find the key to our minds. But as you are pointing out, non-duality as an idea is dual in nature. It can point towards the truth but it can never be the truth.

@lmfao have you tried the middle way of doing squats while shitting? Disclaimer: This is very high consciousness, do at your own risk.

If reality is groundless, how can the waking state, being a higher order of reality than dreams be more grounded? Wouldn't that make it less real? What if the seeming continuity is nothing more than that, and we create a sense of continuity by perpetuating certain patterns of behavior by thought/ego/identity. So you wake up and go about your day thinking you are the same as you were when you went to sleep, which makes you live a day much similar to yesterday. What if you create seeming continuity by thinking it is so? But this would mean that reality is a manifestation of mind and not the other way around. Have you tried having a dream within a dream? So you wake up in your bed and think you are awake, but you are still dreaming? What if the waking state is like that? Sure, it might be closer to the beginning of the infinite chain of dreams, but where is the beginning and end of infinity? Being awake sure seems like it's more real than dreaming in my sleep, but how do i know I am not dreaming in a dream? That i believe to be awake and in the 'real' world only seems so when I relate it to my dreams, and how do I know that I am not just dreaming an amazingly complex dream, with infinite layers to it. Then what sense does it make to compare two stages of the dream and say that one is a higher order of reality than the other. The layers are like the layers of a cake, it's all one cake with infinite layers, and not one layer is higher or lower than the rest. Its like a cake-layered cake. All experience is one experience. We can talk from now til infinity about the relationships of the different manifestations of experience/dream, compare them to one another and explain how it all comes together. But its like whenever we say something we leave something out. Like building sandcastles near the shore. Or pushing a giant rock up a hill for eternity. Started trailing off, hope something was worthwhile reading.

Grounded in what`?

I love dream-analogies, dreams have taught me quite a lot. What if a dream is a fractal of a life. That you wake up living every life as a dream. So dreams would be dreams within dreams, or a deeper level of the dream. Lucid dreaming is like waking without waking, so in life it would be dying without dying. When you lucid dream it's almost like your dream-'I' dies and you become the dream as you realize you are not the guy caught up in some kind of drama, but rather that all that is is you. What if all dreams are exact representations of all lives in what we think of as the waking state. Many dreams are non-lucid, just as many lives end before enlightenment, but every dream as every life is precious in its own way, as they are all perfect manifestations of the higher self. Coming to rest in whatever dream/life/experience one might be having right here and now is the end of illusion, as you become one with the truth, one with your higher self that is the whole dream. You fall awake when you stop clinging to ideas about reality vs. yourself. The idea of a problem is the problem. The idea of separation is the separation. Even so, having ideas about things and thoughts for that matter is not a problem. The problem is not accepting that everything is in perfect order right here and now. But this is not a problem. Everything happens at its rightful time. How can this ever be explained in words? Saying there is no problem is saying there is a problem. Reading about how the key is to relax is now an idea of having to relax which makes it impossible to relax. Just be, i guess.

The logical mind is great at faking creativity. Like painting abstract art by an idea of what abstract is. Or writing a poem by the idea of how a poem should come about. True creativity is unbounded, completely authentic and original. It is pretty shy, and as soon as I start judging/thinking it goes away. It is like a spirit that visits me from time to time, but if I search for it I can never find it. If it comes by my window and I try to catch it, it evades my hand like smoke. If I try to be sneaky and guide it, it quickly fades.

I believe creativity is that childish thoughtless state where intuition takes the spotlight from rationality. Thought attempts to perpetuate the known, while creativity is the exact opposite. Now, is it possible to enter a state of thought which is more atttuned for creativity? i believe so but thought has to take the backseat, like the navigator in a rally-car. The driver has to be completely intuitive/no-thought, and let thought(navigator) guide his creativity. Just know,that the more you try to control the direction of your creativity, the more you restrict the creative aspect. The way I attempt to strengthen my creativity is to constantly look for ways to do things differently. Always taking different routes, doing silly stuff along the way. I paint, write, play music, dance etc. and when I do each of th see things I try to let go of the ideas constantly popping into my head about how they should be done. It's about breaking down those patterns that arise out of repetition, without completely eradicating them. Slowly you'll find it easier and easier to get into a 'flow-state'. With dancing I lose myself and become an extension of the Music(The music becomes my navigator). With painting I lose myself and become a translator of spirit into form. Creativity is all about letting go. You are essentially creativity, so reaching the unbounded state of no-thought allows your authentic self to unfold. Reaching this state is one thing, keeping it for extended periods of time is something much more difficult, as you want to be in control of a state that is essentially uncontrollable and perpetuate what is essentially anti-perpetuation.

Yes it's really confusing, seems impossible to grasp. Every thing must have borders, or else it would not be a thing right? And if it has borders there must be something outside of it, even if that thing is nothing. So, what can we say about absolute infinity? It cannot be a thing, and yet here we are talking about it.