The0Self

Totally depends on your definition of thought. What you call thought I call experience. What I call thoughts, one can certainly have the experience of not having for extended periods. Meditation can go incredibly deep.

Oh yes. They can. But enlightenment is the end of glimpses.

There seems to be a body. There seems to be a here. If it seems to be real as well, that’s also just what’s apparently happening. Nobody knows it’s actually happening, or even that it’s apparently happening. It just apparently happens.

That’s a misunderstanding of enlightenment. It can’t be understood because it’s too simple to get.

When will stops, so does reality. So, reality is contingent, meaning empty. What is is only what is. What has no basis doesn’t even actually have no-basis.

It’s something I had realized as well. Though I would’ve said “the body is an experience.” It’s not actually perceived or felt because nothing is actual, only apparent. No basis or substance. Only what seems to appear. And that’s everything.

@Fran11 In a sense there isn’t free will, but there also isn’t not-free will.

If seeking-the-truth is based on fear, that’s exactly how you know it isn’t really seeking-the-truth. There’s nothing more scary than the truth. It’s death; no you.

Psychedelics don’t really provide an abiding state of enlightenment. They just give you an opportunity to have insights and increased conscious energy, for the courage and freedom to step into a higher state of consciousness. That’s not enlightenment. The enlightened inhabit the same dream state as people, but are lucid in it. In it, not of it. If you want an abiding state of enlightenment, then, well, to paraphrase Jed McKenna off the top of my head: “Ramana Maharshi’s self inquiry is the bomb. The only way ‘who am I?’ can fail to result in enlightenment is if you fail to do it. But almost nobody actually does it. The sincere practice of self inquiry would take a year or two of excruciatingly intense processing to go all the way through.“ To really do self inquiry is to set fire to your life. Not that anything will actually fall apart, but it may or may not seem to, and you have to be unconcerned with the outcome, whatever it may be. Still want enlightenment?

In one dream-story allegorical possibility, God/everything was bored with peace and contentment, so he made appearance, but everything was still boring because it all made sense and was perfect, so he imagined someone who could see it as imperfect, so that he could experience adventure, surprise, and delight, through everyone, and never be lonely. It's just a story though.

I think it’s conceivable an ego got ahold of some message but it isn’t believed here to be my ego. “We (dream characters) are the products of the dream state of the larger self. There’s no self though...“ used to be a basic summary of my understanding (plus all the bells and whistles, jhanas, etc) but it was all just very nice dream stuff. Now there’s just free fall. Don’t know what to make of it.

I’m interested in you too. There’s no suffering here, btw. At least none that means anything at all. Real talk. I guess you could call it personal enlightenment. But what would you say this (my character) knows? I don’t recognize my self as enlightened, because there is no self.

Something interesting is happening over there. I can recognize what you say somehow. Same thing happened to me, but it’s like “I” was cut out of the picture before the dream was even over. I’m sure many would call this “enlightenment.” There is still sometimes pain and even what I guess could be described as suffering (barely), but it doesn’t matter. There are still thoughts here though. What do you mean there are no thoughts? I’m suddenly interested.

I can say without a doubt there is no problem with open mindedness. What you can’t accept is that you being born out of a chicken’s egg is as valid as, well, anything else. And “you” never will. “I” never did. It didn’t matter in the end. Infinity is beyond comprehension, literally and obviously. More truth, but not really more, since there’s only all-the-truth already: comprehension is infinity.

There is no bias. No right or wrong. It’s actually unbelievable to a liberal (like “me”) that a conservative could be enlightened. They can and sometimes are. Let that fucking sink in. Read it and weep, fellow progressives. By liberal I don’t mean what Vaush calls liberal. That’s practically conservative.

Not that it matters, but I’ll add: enlightenment and consciousness are opposites, but there are no opposites. This isn’t spirituality.

When you judge literally nothing, you don’t “accept everything.” Although that can appear to happen, it’s only because you’re still judging. What would be the point of accepting something, unless you judged it first? What happens when you don’t judge or reject anything, is not that you start accepting everything, there’s just no one left that could accept or reject anything.

There is apparent logical evidence of a brain appearing in direct experience. Doesn’t mean it’s real. Doesn’t mean experience is real either. So it doesn’t matter. Stuff only matters in real experience.

Especially existential suffering. "Break on through to the other side." I see no reason for this to be ultimately true though. There are a million ways to get enlightened and all of them at the end of the day are just an every-which-way-confused upside down and cross-eyed swan dive into the abyss.

Permanent implies some "one" abiding in a state that it can find, know, have, and enjoy, forever. When the I/doer/beholder apparently dissolves, there can be glimpses of no-self, and the I can appear to return and then long-for its own absence -- though it can't seem to remember what it was like. When the I apparently falls away totally, there's nowhere for it to come back to, it was never there, and there are no more questions. And btw, what you think you’re seeking is not what you’re seeking. If it was you’d just kill yourself on the spot. I think some others are too polite to say that. Enlightenment is not you becoming something else. It’s the end of you, and (in a sense) the beginning of something else.

@Mvrs Now is a story if what is meant by now is "this now and not that now." There is only now, one could say. One could say there is only ______. Doesn't even matter what you call it.

Yes but not "now" as if contrasted with some "other" time. And it's not just what could happen. This is what's happening and not happening -- in fact, what's happening is what's not happening. If absolutely everything is happening, nothing is really happening.

Experience never ends because it never started. Forever is a story. Now (as opposed to some "other" time) is a story too.

Even assuming that we came from monkeys is you imbuing your experience with meaning — that this is coming from somewhere. Not that I wouldn’t do the same, but it wouldn’t come from any knowledge, it would simply be something this character appeared to do. With that said, the human, and only the human, as far as it seems, seems to develop an apparent me in very early childhood. Before this, they get by with regular sensorimotor function just as any animal would, and continue to when they’re an adult — the adult just has the added “me.” It’s entirely possible that in some people, the me never actually even apparently develops. (It’s not actually there in anyone...) No action really proves whether or not there’s an apparent me there, because anything can happen, there is only everything, and no one outside of everything that could know everything. “God” can perhaps pretend to forget that it’s everything, in order to know things; be interested; enjoy the ride... but animals are just life — everything makes sense; no room for meaning (“makes sense“ in that there’s no one to make sense of what seems to be happening; no certainty; no doubt).

Well at least we know where your sticking point is. The snake is in fact not a self. Neither is the human though, but the human experiences its surroundings with meaning and purpose imbued in it. The snake doesn’t experience meaning and purpose at all.