Osaid

Oh man, don't bring me into this. But yeah, good summary.

First and foremost, nothing. From there can be love, food, and the rest of life.

Thank you for the reminder. Welcome back. It can seem hard at first to stop thinking and start smelling. You cannot think about a rose, you can only look at it and smell it. It is wise not to create philosophies out of such an experience.

No clue.

No, not the omnipresent non-dual one. The question makes no sense in that context. You might be able to make contact with some alien overlord running the simulation though, which gets close to the relative materialistic idea of God I guess.

No, there is no "more enlightened." It is binary. You are either aware of it or you aren't. You can either see the color red, or you can't. You are either hearing sound, or you aren't. There are no levels to it. Higher or lower is a duality which exists in intellect and ideology. None of what you said is enlightenment, it is just your idea of it that you have strung together from your exposure to people who seem enlightened. The desire to cling to ideas about enlightenment without being aware of what it is perpetuates the problem I am talking about. You cannot realize something without embodying it. That means it is simply an intellectual or logical realization, not a genuine one. The lack of embodiment is simply a cognitive dissonance between your intellect and your genuine perception of experience.

There was probably none of that, just the guise of one. This is why I clearly make a binary distinction between someone who is or isn't enlightened. It is binary. Either you are aware of what you are or you aren't. Otherwise, you have turned reality and non-duality into an unsustainable ideology. You have replaced your previous ideology with a newer and more spiritual one, but at the end of the day, it is still ideology and it does not transcend that medium.

In the form of sativa edibles, yes. I don't have any other experiences with marijuana. What it did was that it stunted my ability to think about the past or future. My experience became very "light" and "dreamlike" as a result because there was absolutely no context to it. It felt like I was just stuck in one moment for hours, there was absolutely zero interaction with time. When I had a memory of the past, it felt like a dream I had 1000 years ago, it was very hard to perceive. It felt like my knowledge of the past and future was constantly "rebooting", it would start forming, and then instantly vanish and attempt to reform itself again. So my short term memory was completely screwed, all my knowledge and perception had to be based in what was presently going on (I believe this is what creates the paranoia commonly associated with marijuana). Apparently I did not stop talking a single moment for about 6 hours straight, because everytime I talked it felt like it was the first time I ever talked. The only thing I could do was just constantly talk about what I was experiencing, because there was nothing else to talk about, I could not refer to past or future. No clue how this is considered "recreational." If I had to theorize, an enjoyable or recreational experience would have the same mechanism but to a lesser degree, similar to how alcohol stunts your ability to think about the future. But for me, the dial was turned to 100 and I could not access past or future functionally at all, then it slowly started to wear off.

Lol, I literally took 15mg edibles (supposedly a beginners dose) incrementally over the course of hours with all the necessary precautions, and then hours later all of a sudden my ability to imagine the past and future basically vanished in an instant. People have no clue how these things actually work or affect people.

Yep, that is exactly what happened. From my perspective, it really does look like some kind of subtle psychosis, and not all of it on the forum is even very subtle at all. I believe this only really happens through the psychedelic route. You will not find anyone paranoid about solipsism in a workshop or ashram or Zen monastery.

This is just human nature, or more accurately, ego nature. Spiritual views do not put you above it. I also noticed a misanthropic bias when it comes to spirituality, but perhaps moreso in the psychedelic circles. Many factors can be pointed out, but I believe part of it is the beautiful and blissful states that psychedelics create, combined with the contrast in coming back down to the baseline human experience and having to live there. Not as much as any other person. If it is someone chronically taking psychedelics, I believe that creates a higher potential for closed-mindedness though. With psychedelics, there is an initial moment of "wow I don't know what reality is" which moves into "the psychedelics showed me that this is what reality is, I need more psychedelic experiences so I can piece it all together, no, you're wrong, you just need to take more psychedelics." Psychedelic experiences are very powerful. In strength, it is like experiencing being robbed or having your house burned down. It is very radical and real. Humans already imagine bearded men in the sky from their baseline state, imagine what kind of beliefs psychedelics would create.

They are definitely merged with infinity, that is what not having an ego means. Animals don't even make the distinction between outward and inward to begin with.

It is the exact same mechanism. The duality of enlightenment depends on an ego existing, and that is created by human intelligence. Unenlightenment is an invention of human imagination. Animals do not have that intelligence, and so they exist enlightened. The lack of a finite identity exists equally in animals and enlightened humans, that is what creates enlightenment. I believe you are conflating ego and intelligence to be the same thing, but they are not. I am not saying that enlightenment is a removal of your ability to imagine things, it is just seeing what imagination truly is. When you are not enlightened it is because you cannot perceive your imagination properly. Being enlightened is simply just perceiving your intelligence properly, it is not a removal of intelligence, but rather a removal of a false identification with that intelligence.

Yes, exactly, they have no idea about themselves, therefore they are completely focused on their experience of themselves, that means it is impossible for them to have an ego and therefore they are enlightened. Enlightenment is very simple. Only humans can become unenlightened because of their ability to imagine things. It is the state of not being enlightened which is complex, not enlightenment. Enlightenment is subtractive in nature, it is a removal of the false identity which human imagination creates. Human imagination is complex, not enlightenment. A worm cannot delude itself into thinking that it is finite because it lacks the capacity to think. To be enlightened as a human means being able to think but also simultaneously seeing that the thought is not true beyond what it exists as.

If they want to be alive, yes. If there is no desire for living, then there is no fear. Like I said, the fear is intelligent in regards to what you desire. 4 year olds are quite rowdy, yes. I would say they are not as pure as you think, as they basically absorb what they learn from their surroundings like a sponge, and that is by design so that they can learn how to survive. That means they absorb all the beliefs and reactions of their parents. But if you dial it back a bit, an infant would be a better example and I would actually consider them enlightened. An infant would not even be scared of a lion in front of it. It also has close to zero imaginative capacity. It has to learn from its parents and its own experience what to fear first. When you combine your knowledge of things that can harm you with the desire to live, that is what creates fear in accordance with sustaining your survival. For infants in particular, they do not even have a concept of not being alive, so their desire to live would more accurately just be a desire to avoid painful sensations. I think you will find that coincidentally all of it ties back into your idea of yourself, AKA the ego. There is a root structure, which is your belief in what you think you are. If it is uprooted, then so are all the neuroses that stem from it.

Yes, that automatically goes away. The only reason you experience psychological fear is because you believe that you can imagine yourself. You imagine yourself in past and future scenarios and then become scared of those scenarios happening to you. It is the belief that you can be afflicted by past and future scenarios which creates all psychological fear. It is essentially your sense of time which creates psychological fear, the idea that there is a you which has gone through the past and will go through the future.

Yes. There is no imagined fear, yes. Otherwise, emotions like fear are an intelligent response to what you want, they ultimately serve you and they are in direct alignment with your desires. Emotions only become problematic when you believe you can imagine yourself, because this causes the emotion to perpetuate itself endlessly since you can imagine yourself from anywhere. When you imagine something fearful, that is because you want to perserve the imagination you have of yourself, in that sense it is intelligent because it serves your goal. If you cannot imagine yourself anymore, all fear is seen as essential to help you survive and perserve your actual body, which is what you want. Fear is not seen as "bad" when it is experienced in response to an immediate threat, although it can be objectively unpleasant. The unpleasant sensation tells you to move your body away from the threat in the exact same way physical pain makes you remove your hand from a hot stove. You would not say that feeling physical pain when touching a hot stove is a bad thing or a good thing, it is just intelligent and essential for learning how to survive. All emotions after being enlightened become completely situational, which means they are specific responses to certain situations, they have nothing to do with a person or object.

Yes, that is where your life actually begins, you could say. Not being enlightened is like playing a game of Super Mario while thinking you are Bowser. This causes a lot of suffering and confusion. Enlightenment is like realizing "oh I was Mario this entire time, what was I thinking" and then actually going on with your life and then playing and appreciating the game properly.

Leo doesn't even believe in non-duality anymore. I'm not even talking about opinion. I am saying there is an objective experiential shift you can have in your experience which prevents you from thinking about yourself ever again, and that this is enlightenment. This is the same thing every enlightened person across history has been pointing to, and it is not something that can get reinvented or integrated through more questioning and philosophizing over time. It is becoming aware of exactly what you and your experience is. It's like I'm telling you that I can see the color red and you're like "but have you questioned it enough?" Questioning red is not going to make the color red more true or accurate, because I am already experiencing exactly what it is. The only thing that can be refined or polished over time are your limited beliefs and concepts about experience, AKA intellect.

If it weren't for Leo I probably wouldn't have gotten enlightened as quick as I would have, but we both agree he has basically lost the plot. It was like a necessary evil, but it doesn't have to be that way at all if someone knows what they are talking about. I was always very intellectual and philosophical so he spoke my language, and that hooked me in. But it is not necessary to go that route if you have someone to tell you "there's no need to philosophize about this, all you have to do is inquire about your direct experience until you realize that you can't think about yourself." All my philosophizing made me very good at inquiring about experience and that did help a lot especially when I did self-inquiry, but that was its limit. Anything gained from it aside from purely my ability to inquire and question things was basically mental baggage. I basically maxed out my ability to inquire years ago, then the rest of the time was just me running circles around random intellectual and metaphysical ideas which were completely unrelated to my actual experience. It took someone who actually knew what they were talking about to redirect me and say "It's not about philosophy, inquire about this instead and you will eventually immediately and permanently figure out what your experience is." The intention doesn't really matter if it doesn't work. Enlightenment itself is not philosophical or spiritual at all. It is completely secular and unique to itself. Can spirituality lead there? Maybe, but that is just what leads there, it is not enlightenment. Can philosophy lead there? Maybe, but that is just what leads there, it is not enlightenment. Enlightenment has nothing to do with spirituality or philosophy in the same way that the color red has nothing to do with any of those. You can certainly look at red in a way that is spiritual, and you can certainly philosophize about what red is, but red itself does not pertain itself to any of those.

There's a good reason why Osho and any enlightened person makes sure to distinguish it from what they are talking about. I am just trying to point out that reason.

I don't think this. This is not what enlightenment is. This is the default state of anyone who isn't enlightened. They think they exist as a concept and as a result they view reality the same. The problem in philosophy goes very deep, it ties into the human tendency to conceptualize reality. When you become enlightened you realize what thoughts actually are, not as a philosophy to contemplate or integrate, but as an experiential perceptual shift.

It has recently come to my attention that Osho is not a philosopher. I have seen him explicitly state this multiple times in his teachings because he is often misinterpreted as being one, and two on the forum have previously convinced me that he is one. There is a distinct difference between someone who teaches enlightenment and someone who teaches philosophy. Philosophy points to concepts. Someone who teaches enlightenment uses concepts to point to actuality. What is especially tricky is that the philosopher is not going to be aware that they are merely using concepts to point to concepts, they are going to believe that they are pointing to what is actual. Someone who is enlightened is someone who recognizes the exact limits of conceptualization, so they use it with perfect utility. The enlightened person uses concepts to make you realize the limits of concepts. The philosopher does not realize this limit, and so their entire world is made out of intellect which points to nothing of any actual existence, because they are imagining that their intellect has some sort of existence beyond their imagination.

If triangles had a God, they would give it 3 sides. Humans are very good at deceiving themselves, yes. They are so good at deceiving, that they even ascribe divinity to it. God/consciousness has deceived me. The entirety of existence is just deception because it keeps fooling me. Yes, that must be it.

The post asked about enlightenment, and the answer is very simply that enlightenment has nothing to do with that. What you're talking about is supernatural powers or something, completely unrelated to recognizing what your experience is. It is literally a duality of "having powers" and "not having powers" which you must induce by putting a substance in your body in a very specific way, so there is no way it is something absolute or inherent to experience, otherwise you would not need to go through this process. Enlightenment is recognizing what you are currently experiencing, not changing it because of some logic you came up with regarding God and the universe.