VeganAwake

"The Greatest Obstacle to Discovery Is Not Ignorance—It Is the Illusion of Knowledge" - Daniel J. Boorstin The biggest issue is thinking "you" understand and know what is being looked for. The very idea of what you're looking for hides it.(hence the importance of emptying the glass) Enlightenment is not a gaining, attainment or achievement. It's not something you arrive at one day with enough diligent spiritual practice, it's the crumbling away of untruth and the disentangling from the socially conditioned Mind Matrix experienced as the "sense of self".

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"The greatest minds in human history have often pointed to levels of thought beyond the limited self structure. Einstein said “The true measure of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” So it’s not that thinking and the existence of the self is bad, thinking is a wonderful tool when the mind is in service to the heart. In Vedanta it is said that the mind makes a good servant but a poor master. The ego perpetually filters reality through language and labels, and is constantly judging. Preferring one thing over another. When the mind and senses are your master, they will create endless suffering, endless craving and aversion, locking us into the matrix of thinking" -- Samadhi (Maya illusion of the self)

@Raptorsin7 ❤

This is where you have to look for yourself and be your own judge. Do these culturally conditioned perspectives and narratives hold up under close scrutiny. After all if you were born in Kuwait for example, you would have a different name and a completely different set of perspectives and narratives, beliefs etc... When the sense of "self" is recognized to be no more than culturally conditioned thoughts identified with for the past 20 plus years it can get very wobbly and more fluid like than the solid entity once previously identified with. ❤

Eckhart Tolle has a lot of great stuff in this area.

Yeah I have an all glass dining room table it's pretty sweet... even the atoms and molecules are glass.

Thoughts are like the homeless cat that lives underneath your trailer. The more you feed it the more it keeps coming back. Don't get attached to that damn cat. ?

Yes everything is difficult to put into words especially when it ends up being nothing in the end....0. ? Its THIS!!

Notice how culturally conditioned thoughts about who you are sort of makeup the character there. If you were born and raised in Iran you'd be a completely different character. Notice how thoughts about who you are cancel each other out.... one person in China that's having a good day might think you're a nice polite fellow; another person in Alaska that's having a bad day may think you're an arrogant jerk; a teenage girl in India might find you very interesting and open-minded. There is no real truth about who or what you are... it's really all just socially conditioned perspective. The idea of who you are is not as solid as it seems to be!!

Drop the idea of what 'you' think is going to happen, just LOOK and notice what makes up this sense of 'self' experience.

The conditioned self centered experience of 'I am', places an overlay over top of reality and creates a very limited experience from this perspective often referred to as the dream story. It's a real and unreal experience simultaneously.(paradox) Real in the sense that it's what is apparently experienced. Unreal in the sense that when this self-centered energetic experience collapses, it's recognized as having never been! It's recognized by no one that the apparent individual(seeking energy) desperately searching for a better experience in the future is completely unreal. This recognition takes the concept of living and dying completely out of the equation because it's realized for the first time that the very entity holding these concepts to be real, was Maya (illusion of the self).

1: Master, master! I get it! 0: Get it? Get what? 1: What you said just moments ago. 0: What did I say? 1: You said that, at first, we suppose “choiceless awareness” means to refrain from choosing “this” or “that.” Eventually we come to understand it means to abstain from the idea that there is a “this” or “that”—that there even are two realities between which one could make a choice. 0: And are you saying that you got that point? 1: Before, based on what I’d heard, I assumed that it means the way we usually tend to make choices on the basis of the way we think things should be, or should not be. 0: Which would be a practical meaning, on one level. We could say, from the standpoint of advaita. 1: Yes, but I’m now looking at it from the standpoint of ajata; that there is no separate reality, from the start. 0: Yes, go on. 1: Where a relative world exists, there would be a “this” and “that” to choose between. But where the world is seen to be unreal, any of the things which we could choose between would be equally unreal. Even the “chooser” would be seen to be unreal. Isn’t this what you mean when you speak of “emptiness”? 0: That’s right. Recall the Heart Sutra? “In emptiness, there is no form—no feelings, thoughts, conceptions, consciousness; no body, mind—no beginning or ending.” And the Diamond Sutra—approved by Buddha—is saying, as ajata teaches, that all forms are completely and totally empty of “intrinsic existence.” Where even the body and the mind have no substantive reality, neither does the “world”—affirmed by them—sustain any reality either. In regard to choiceless awareness: where even “consciousness” is recognized to be merely another of our separative distinctions, even the idea of “awareness” itself evaporates—let alone there no longer being anything to “choose.” 1: So, as long as we take the world itself to be real, we haven’t really understood emptiness? 0: Where we even take “existence” to be real, we haven’t completely absorbed the teaching of emptiness. In the Diamond Sutra, Buddha is said to have stated that not only is there “no self,” but “no life.” Total and complete emptiness would not be a form: such would not have a beginning nor an end. Thus we could not even designate it as “existent” or “nonexistent.” 1: You’ve said that ajata means “no creation”; the implication is that not anything we take to be real ever had a beginning or an ending; that is, has ever “existed.” 0: This is why it is practically necessary to comprehend the teachings of advaita before contemplating ajata. When it is clear that there “are not two things,” it can be understood that “the one thing” is in actuality no thing: formless, empty. Nothingness. 1: I get that—comprehending that even the “I” is empty, as empty as any concept of nothingness! 0: Then you do get the full meaning of choiceless awareness. Who is there, that could get what? There are no real “choices,” nor a real “awareness” of them. 1: It seems to me that you could compare advaita to ajata, like atomic physics to quantum physics. 0: As long as you bear in mind that all comparisons are empty of reality. -- Ajata Project (Robert Wolfe)

Well it points to apparent existence or creation as ultimately having never been and thus making the idea of infusion non-applicable to the teaching of Ajata. Its saying that the whole of existence and all apparent happenings/experiences, simply never occurred!

And ajata is pointing to the deep recognition that even the so-called ultimate singularity is completely lacking in reality. Hence 0 not 1

@SamC keep doing exactly what you were doing. Be empty and aware. It's right under your nose and so close it seems hidden. Be confident in what is recognized ❤

No ❤

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Nothingness "Underneath the condition when you are awake and aware, and beneath the condition when you are in bed at night and dreaming, there is the deep-sleep condition. Here, there are no thoughts, there is no “you”, no mind, no relationships, no other, nor world, or universe. There is merely a condition of empty presence, no-thing-ness. Everything, every form, event, etc., is superimposed on this empty presence, by the mind in the waking or dreaming state. But the organism, the body, continues to exist despite these daily reoccurrence of emptiness. This condition in which there is no mind, no thoughts, no forms, and no you, is the “ground” state, your natural state. This empty presence is the condition of the organism before its birth (and its conditioning and the arising of the I-thought), and will be its condition once again upon the death of the form of “your life”. In other words, an organism appears to arise within empty presence, matures, and recedes again into empty presence (similar to the way an electron arises and recedes in the quantum field). The organism knew nothing of existence or nonexistence before birth, and will know nothing after death: “You” will not know that you— or anything else— ever had “existed”. Recognizing the fleeting temporality of “existence” – and that existence will be completely non-existent, in due course— it becomes clear that not anything that you do, think, feel or say has any lasting significance or meaning. (This is the message of the Bhagavad Gita.) All that appears, to the organism, to be done is merely a momentary expression of the field of ever-present beingness—utterly lacking in lasting reality. This is why it is said, in the nondual writings, that “nothing really matters”. It is also why it is said that (as a book about Papaji is titled) “nothing ever happened.” All that we learn in advaita is intending to point our attention to nothingness. (And not its “existence” or “nonexistence”, since where there is nothing, neither of these are applicable.) In other words, the intention of advaita, or nonduality, is to direct us to ajata. And, I would say, a thorough understanding of the former is necessary in order to comprehend the latter. When we come to recognize that, in truth, there is nothing from the start, we understand what is meant when it is said that all that we perceive is simply a dream, an illusion— seemingly superimposed on ever-lasting empty presence. Now, is this information simply an interesting “analysis”, or does this have practical value? Someone recently sent me a book by the Dalai Lama, and I’ll extract a few quotes. All phenomena are empty. Emptiness pervades not only your individual ego or sense of self, but the whole of reality…That emptiness of mind is its ultimate nature, or mode of being. To realize that, is to pierce and see through the deception of ignorance…freedom from ignorance (is called) nirvana… Realizing emptiness is directly related to our quest to purify our mind of afflictive emotions like hatred, anger, and desire…We project onto things a state of “existence”, and a mode of being which is simply not there…. This understanding of emptiness..is one of the principal factors of the true path….For such an insight cuts right through the illusion created by the mis- apprehension of grasping things and events as existing… We realize the emptiness of all phenomena, not just the mind and body of the individual. In my favorite story about Ramana Maharshi, a man came into the room where Ramana held satsang, said he’d written a biography of Ramana and asked permission to read it. Ramana smile and nodded, and the man read his manuscript. It was full of inaccuracies and error: he said that Ramana was married and had children, that he’d been a Socialist before his enlightenment, and on and on. When he finished reading, Ramana smiled and nodded, and the man picked up his manuscript and left. One of Ramana’s disciples cried out, “Master, did you hear what he read? Is any of that real?!” Ramana waved his hand as if taking in the universe, and asked: “Is any of this real?” -- Ajata project (Robert Wolfe)

Rather than trying to transcend, simply notice the identification taking place with these conditioned patterns of thought. 'You' are not conditioned thoughts!! No need to identity as the body's conditioned way of thinking. ❤

Thanks 4 sharing ? ❤

There is NOTHING within the body. The sense of 'I' or 'ME' within the body is an illusion/or misidentification with bodily senses, conditioned thinking and contracted energy. So a body apparently dies, but nothing else dies OR keeps on living because it was Maya (illusion of the self). Illusions cannot die or keep on living, because they're not REAL in the first place. So in a sense, death is already the case. Enjoy the dream story while it lasts or don't either way its not real and it doesn't matter ?

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innocent beholder of a meaningless dream.

Why not? & Who is 'I' that's asking?