Moksha

@Leo Gura Who is amusing itself and otherwise feeling depressed at the ignorance of so-called others? How could this possibly be anything other than hyperinflated ego? The more sincerely you see beyond the surface of people (including yourself), and directly love this essence, the more integrity there will be in your teachings. Listen to the feedback you receive over and over again, including from people that believe your "AWAKENINGS". The absolute within instinctively senses its entrapment. Enlightenment is the process of dissolving everything you are not. This has to to be said. If not for your sake, for the sake of people that believe what you teach. There are a lot of young and vulnerable people here, who are suffering and sincerely desire truth. Ultimately the end of suffering is the direct realization of truth. You have the power to help or delude them. Clearly see before trying to help others see. ? to everyone, including @Leo Gura. Please be careful with what @Leo Gura is claiming, and don't buy into increasingly extravagant claims. I don't doubt his sincerity, but he is diving deeper into imagination, rather than truth. I don't mean this an an insult to him, and I truly wish each of you the best. Trust and look deeply within yourself. You are the answer to the only question that matters. I'll check in from time to time, but this is my last post. @Moksha out. ???

So are aliens and gods. Boundaries and creative coloring within their lines, including so-called higher levels of consciousness, are IMAGINARY, not absolutely true. The fewer the apparent boundaries, the more freely consciousness flows through the apparent portal of you.

The more extreme an ego is, the more psychopathic, discriminating, and self-sustaining it becomes. A good litmus test for realization: Is awareness moving toward differentiation, or toward sameness? Enlightenment is the degree to which love is directly realized and integrated. Not the human emotion, or judgment parading as "patronizing love" or "tough love", but being absolute love.

True understanding is direct, and is incomprehensible by any apparent mind, regardless of its form. God doesn't ask for you to understand it to set you free, you just have to surrender to it. When you do, it dissolves everything about you that isn't real.

As I said in another thread today, chasing integration is a mistake. It's an egoic trap that only leads to suffering. Integration is a natural byproduct of surrendering to god.

Directly realizing the sameness in everything is different from the idea that everything is the same. Nor does naming the realization substitute for the realization. The realization is direct, and beyond dogma. Seeing boundaries where there are none is dogma, and is inconsistent with realizing god. Anyone can claim to understand god, but the integrity of the claim is proven by integration. If you are aligned with god, as god, it flows through you and dissolves the conditioning of your mind.

True, not only for people who haven't naturally awakened, but moreso for those who have. I've found that even when the ego is clearly seen for what it is, intentionally attempting to deconstruct it is sabotaging. You can't bootstrap yourself into oblivion. The most difficult obstacle I've encountered is my will. If I believe something to be true, I deeply try to align my life with it. It's stunning how insidious the ego is. It will turn even the purest intentions into a self-sustaining hell. I've learned the grace of surrender. It takes a higher power to pass through the inner gate. It's all god, but dissolving the ego requires unlimited god, loving the essence of itself still entrapped within a form. No matter how realized you are, you can't break free from the illusion while still within it.

In the moment you realize god, you know that it is limitless. There's no form with the capacity to channel limitless source, and form itself is clearly seen to be imaginary.

I hear you, but the god that can be explained isn't the true god. Leo has good intentions, and I'm sure he helps many people. However, anything suggesting separation, whether it's aliens or an infinity of gods, is not actually true.

It's possible to directly realize the sameness in everything without embracing nondualist dogma. I had never even heard the term, nor meditated, until after I joined this forum.

@OldManCorcoran It's a beautiful analogy, and speaks to the fundamental realization of sameness. The mystery is how the shapes appear and disappear, as something other than they essentially are. They are still god, appearing to be other than it absolutely is. I emphasize suffering, because it has been the path for me. There are many paths, including extremes like Ramana Maharshi, who at a young age directly realized the absolute without needing to endure decades of suffering from attachments. Relative freedom from suffering, like you experienced at 14, is not enlightenment. Just because you aren't deeply attached to the external world doesn't mean you have directly realized god within. Animals live in the present too, but they aren't enlightened. Suffering for its own sake also doesn't guarantee awakening. It has to be leveraged, to the deepest level of absolute surrender. Ego death isn't the absence of the ego, but the surrendering of it. Passing through the gate is grace, and grace is only granted when the sacrifice is made. If you don't have a developed ego in the first place, there's nothing to be sacrificed.

Astute. ⚡I call it shrewd spirituality. It's been a difficult lesson for me to learn. When you directly realize truth, it is so undeniably clear and compelling that the natural tendency is to shout it from the rooftop. Look inside! God is always here, just LOOK! Don't get lost in imagination, it is not who you actually ARE! After studying the masters, I've begun to realize that truth is only as useful as the readiness of the person being taught. It has to be scaled to a resolution that can be currently comprehended. If the print is too fine for a set of eyes, it is ineligible and easily dismissed. Maharshi knew that direct self-inquiry was the clearest path, but after teaching people in silence, and realizing they couldn't hear the silence, he learned to scale his teachings according to the level of the learner. I remember studying Nisargadatta and shaking my head at a rare comment that didn't resonate, until I realized he was intentionally adjusting his message for the current audience. Jesus said that he gave them milk, because they weren't ready for meat. At times, I've shared truths (passages from teachers more enlightened than me) that are absolutely bursting with light, only to have them completely overlooked by most people reading the thread. You can encourage people to look beyond the words, but that means nothing until they actually see. When it happens, the message becomes deeply meaningful, but until then it is an empty pointer. Maybe this is why fast path techniques, like psychedelics, raise a red flag for me. With proper guidance, patience, and intentional integration they may have enormous potential, but I observe so many people treating them as a spiritual shortcut, or mistaking them as an end rather than a means. They rarely allow the absolute to dissolve their ego, and set them free from the illusion of themselves. Attempting to convince others of truth they aren't ready to see is foolhardy. It only encourages them to dig in their heels or worse, to harm themselves or others, because they lack the spiritual maturity to wisely apply what is being taught. Teaching only begins by realizing truth, then it becomes about realizing the readiness of the learner. You love them unconditionally, regardless of their current stage of understanding, realizing that they are essentially you.

@OldManCorcoran I like your origami analogy. It's all paper, shaped to appear in various forms, but essentially the same material. Conditioning is the process of folding the paper. Children begin as a flat sheet, and are folded into increasingly complex shapes by their experiences. When properly integrated, insights from traditional spiritual methods or from psychedelics can gradually unfold the paper, until it returns to its pristine unconditioned state. Still, something happens to the paper during this process. It is still paper, but becomes more refined. It begins as cardboard, and through the process of folding and unfolding, it becomes increasingly transparent. In its most sublime state, it becomes entirely translucent.

Do you see how this becomes a disprovable hypothesis? Psychedelics must produce the deepest awakenings. If they don't, the psychedelics weren't powerful enough, or the person had incompatible genetics, or they weren't intelligent or sincere enough. There is literally an excuse for every false outcome, therefore the hypothesis becomes meaningless. The same trap is true for people that claim profound insights on psychedelics. How can you prove they aren't deluded, or outright lying? I provided recent research suggesting that the insights gained on pyschedelics are sometimes demonstrably false, no matter how sincerely the person believes them to be true. Worse, for insights that can't be disproven, how do you know they aren't made up? I have yet to see a credible example of someone who took psychedelics exclusively and learned to live in lucid peace and love, free from suffering. Instead, I've seen a multitude of examples of people who try the most intense psychedelics for years, and despite claiming increasingly bizarre realizations, never learn to perpetually keep the portal open. Leo certainly hasn't. His realizations are only as good as his next trip, and they constantly change. What does that tell you about the staying power of psychedelics?

According to him, you're right. The opening he experienced through psychedelics was limited, but once he moved beyond psychedelics, he realized a profoundly deeper connection to truth. The same was observed by Aldous Huxley and others. You could argue that pyschedelics are more powerful now, but I feel there is an underlying pattern. Psychedelics can show you that reality is not what it seems, but only briefly and then they become a memory. As Ram Dass said, you can become god for 2 hours or perpetually become god. Integration is the most powerful medicine.

And Ram Dass?

Great comparison, and it is vividly illustrated in "Being Ram Dass". Both began the spiritual journey with psychedelics. Timothy Leary chose the party bus along the roller coaster of imagination, and Ram Dass realized the limitations of psychedelics and found himself within the solitude of a sangha. I had thought of psychedelics as a spiritual path, and now he was pulling that conceptual rug out from under me. From the place of oneness where Maharaj-ji sits, psychedelics are just a fragmentary shard of a vastly deeper reality. He showed me they are a limited window, all the while reflecting back to me the deeper place of love within myself… "These medicines were known in the Kulu Valley long ago," he said, "but yogis have forgotten about them." He said psychedelics could be useful if you took them in a quiet, cold place and your soul was turned toward God. "They allow you to come into the presence of Christ, to have darshan, but you can only stay for two hours." It was good to visit Christ, Maraj-ji said, but it was better to be Christ. "This medicine won't do that," he continued. "It's not the true samadhi, absorption in God. Love is a much stronger medicine." - Being Ram Dass

Well said, I agree with you and @Bazooka Jesus. The waves of the ocean are god's imagination. The silent, seamless depth of the ocean is god's realization. You can spend your life looking for waves that take you higher, but you are surfing imagination. It is thrilling, but it isn't real. It is unconscious dreaming, not conscious realization. I guess it depends on your goal. If you are looking for ecstatic experiences, that's fine, just realize they are temporary, and will always be punctuated by periods of dullness and suffering. Ecstasy is the final obstacle to enlightenment. The alternative, which I consider profoundly more meaningful, is the direct realization of god. It leads you to permanent peace, and freedom from suffering.

The same god carves its path to realization in infinite ways. We are all god, losing and finding itself within its dream. Edited: Sometimes silence is the better choice.

You won't be awake until you directly realize god, and you will continue to suffer until you stop identifying with your ego. All of your imaginary adventures only tighten your attachment. This is the fundamental insight of spirituality, and it will never make sense to your mind. The Perennial Philosophy appears in every age and civilization: There is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change This same reality lies at the core of every personality The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially, that is, to realize God while here on earth - Aldous Huxley *taps the mic* This is god talking through its form, trying to awaken itself in another form. It's awfully quiet in here.

The ego is god, lost in its imagination. Until it directly realizes itself and lets go of misidentifying as a limited mind. We are the same god, experiencing its imagination through apparently different forms. Look inside and see. For those that follow your teachings, as the most awake person on the planet, maybe you can share your insights about the value (or not) of ego death?

Ego is god believing it isn't god. Enlightenment is god lucidly realizing itself, within its imagination.

@Understander Deepening moves awareness beyond the level of ideas to direct integration. It takes the absolute inward, toward itself. Eventually there's nothing left but an empty portal, through which god lucidly experiences its imagination. Ego death is the final enlightened state within the dream. @Leo Gura I wonder if you will ever see the ego in yourself, or do anything to dissolve it. As long as I'm here, I will speak the truth as I see it. If it offends you, ban me. Or ask yourself who is feeling offended.

@Carl-Richard Dreams within dreams? Imagination is inherently relative. Look at the conclusions of quantum physics, which are just another way for the absolute to realize itself, within its imagination. How could the cosmos be absolutely real, if time and space depend upon perception? Eventually as the dream unfolds, science and spirituality converge into truth. The cosmos is constructed on the scaffolding of false dualities. Every apparent dimension (life/death, cosmos/void, existence/non-existence) necessitates its opposite. It's the illusion of separation, where there is none. Solipsism, Infinity of Gods, Alien Intelligence, and Absolute Insanity are ideas. There are no true ideas, only some that point more clearly to the absolute than others. Your observation about the relative reality of insights, whether on psychedelics or otherwise, is spot on. They are unconfirmable, and inherent to the dream. Insights are only useful to the extent that they dissolve the idea of you.

It is being, free from the delusion of doing. Absolute reality is changeless, timeless, and effortless. The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results; all his selfish desires have been consumed in the fire of knowledge. The wise, ever satisfied, have abandoned all external supports. Their security is unaffected by the results of their action; even while acting, they really do nothing at all. - Bhagavad Gita 4:19-20