Moksha

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Everything posted by Moksha

  1. Reincarnation is a central belief in Buddhism and Hinduism. Ironic, since the wisdom of these religions is that beliefs are illusions of the mind. Does it really matter whether or not the absolute reincarnates itself through a karmic sequence of forms, or incarnates noniteratively? Regardless, incarnation is imagination.
  2. Awareness is depthless, and only appears to deepen realization of itself within its dream. Still, enlightenment is a higher quality experience than dreaming unconsciously.
  3. There's definitely a history of people using psychedelics across spiritual traditions. Still, it's interesting that none of the major writings advocates "medicines" as a primary pathway to enlightenment. At best, they are mentioned as an optional aid to awareness. At worst, they are warned against. A few writings I've come across over the past couple of years regarding drugs and alcohol: [The] things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion [chronicled in The Doors of Perception], I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge. - Aldous Huxley Those who drink to intoxication are digging up their own roots. - Buddha 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." - Ram Dass No doubt, a drug that can affect your brain can also affect your mind, and give you all the strange experiences promised. But what are all the drugs compared to the drug that gave you this most unusual experience of being born and living in sorrow and fear, in search of happiness, which does not come, or does not last. You should inquire into the nature of this drug and find an antidote. Birth, life, death -- they are one. Find out what had caused them. Before you were born, you were already drugged. What kind of drug was it? You may cure yourself of all diseases, but if you are still under the influence of the primordial drug, of what use are the superficial cures? - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj My personal view is that psychedelics can help loosen mental structures, but they are only useful to the extent that people leverage this temporary realization of spaciousness to perpetually detach from the habits of the mind. Unless they do the work of integration, they will probably only be as awake as their next trip. On the Tao Te Ching, it can be more opaque than other sources, but is worth the dive. Even if read at the surface level, people can at least realize that absolute reality is mysterious and beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. That alone is a worthy insight. There are other pearls scatter along the seabed. Some of my favorites: Who can make the muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing. Understanding this and leaving no trace, The wise alone are perfectly blind Seeing clearly into the distance.
  4. By ego, I am referring to the pursuit of desires and avoidance of fears, in the blind belief that doing so will ultimately fulfill you. It never does, and it never will. That is the secret of the game called life. Learn it or don't. People convince themselves that if they just have one more realization, or find their soulmate, or land the right job, or [insert every other desire] life will be so much better. They also convince themselves that if they keep people at arm's distance, or hyper-control their environment, or judge themselves harshly enough, or [insert every other fear] they will be kept safe. None of these lies ever pans out. To the contrary, pursuing desires and fears in the attempt to find fulfillment creates more suffering than if you stop looking for external gratification, and direct your awareness inward. You will still hit your finger with a hammer. People will betray you. Eventually you will die. Welcome to the dream. You can either live it lucidly, and in the process greatly enhance the quality of the experience, or you can live it blindly and suffer. The choice is Yours.
  5. Ramana Maharshi sometimes settled for words, but his highest teaching was silence. As Psalm 46 puts it, "Be still and know that I am God." Silence has power, regardless of the level of the learner. The ego loves conflict, and when it encounters silence, it wilts because there is no opposing energy to feed it. Even deeply unconscious people can respond positively to silence, especially the deep silence flowing from the absolute.
  6. Another way to see it is the unobscured absolute is the anchor, and fears/desires/vanity are the distraction of the absolute from itself. The spiritual journey is about realizing that awareness pointed outward always leads to delusion, disappointment, and suffering. Maybe not apparently at first, but seeking meaning beyond the absolute within is inevitably unfulfilling. To awaken, awareness must be deeply focused inward on itself. Read carefully what I said about judo vs. karate. To defeat the ego, you MUST grapple it so closely that its true nature becomes nauseatingly obvious. Pursuing desires and running from fears is the ego's game, and you will never defeat it on those terms. You have to see that its promises are empty. It has nothing to offer you, except perpetual misery. When you truly realize this, at the deepest level, you have grasped the ego and can throw it forever beyond reach. It is a ghost that is unworthy of you, and the possession must be exorcised by the being of light that you are.
  7. @OldManCorcoran You could say that essentially, we are the same page. It's stunning when the implications are processed by the brain, which is wired to track time, differentiate forms, and label perceptions. It goes beyond the brain, to direct realization, but even the brain eventually submits. Arrogance and humility become irrelevant. Love is realized for what it is. Adam couldn't keep himself from naming every creature; it was in his DNA. Amazingly, while it's nowhere near common yet, the brain has evolved to the point of realizing its own limitations. Einstein saw through the illusion of relativity. He realized that there is unconditional reality, beyond the appearance of space, matter, and time, which depend on the state of the observer and therefore cannot be absolute. Feel-good Buddhism is like feel-good Christianity. People only read the insights of mystics on the surface level, rather seeing beyond to what is being pointed toward. In the various writings I've pondered (Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, etc.), they uniformly point toward the absolute sameness in and beyond everything. For example: They see the same Self in a spiritual aspirant and an outcast, in an elephant, a cow, and a dog. Having conquered their senses, they have climbed to the summit of human consciousness. To such people a clod of dirt, a stone, and gold are the same. They are equally disposed to family, enemies, and friends, to those who support them and those who are hostile, to the good and the evil alike. Because they are impartial, they rise to great heights. They alone see truly who see the Lord the same in every creature, who see the deathless in the hearts of all that die. Seeing the same Lord everywhere, they do not harm themselves or others. Thus they attain the supreme goal. As the same fire assumes different shapes When it consumes objects differing in shape, So does the one Self take the shape Of every creature in whom he is present.
  8. In honor of @SoonHei, I will share this. Karate is trying to beat the ego at its own game. You will always lose. The ego is the master of staying just far enough away to lure you in, before it strikes you with one bone-breaking karate chop after another. Judo is the wisdom of battling the ego on your own terms. Don't let it taunt you from a distance. You have to close the gap, until the ego is within grappling range, so tight that you can smell its fetid breath on your face. Once you get up close and personal with the ego, you see your desires and fears for what they really are. Their tantalizing promises are now clearly realized to be perpetual delusions and spiritual death. It is only then, when the ego is firmly within your grasp, that you have the power to throw it entirely out of the battle cage. You have seen its true nature, and it has no power over you. With the ego gone, your absolute nature will rise like the triumph of the noonday sun. It was always there, you just couldn't see it due to the ego's mesmerizing moves. When @SoonHei shared his Tesla analogy, I didn't realize it as deeply as I do now. It is precisely what I mean by living in the flow state.
  9. Good to see that my friend's wisdom still lives, even across the chasm. Miss you Champ ?
  10. In the flow state, sharing insights can actually transmute to realizing insights. It's one of the best qualities of spiritually engaging with others. As the saying goes, the teacher learns more than the student. That said, I'm realizing it's important to gauge what you share to what is actually needed at the time. People are in different states of awareness, and will respond accordingly. The same has proven true for my own spiritual deepening. Something that was incoherent at an earlier point in my life suddenly becomes luminous. Align the lesson with the learner. The most apt will learn directly from silence, which is not the absence of words, but the being of spirit. If you have to settle for words, that's fine too.
  11. Beautiful analogy. The same is true for gold, which regardless of its shape or setting, remains pure gold.
  12. It's one of the benefits of being essentially timeless ⏳
  13. You don't have to physically meet them to communicate with them, resonate with their living essence (regardless of their form status), or directly realize their sameness. Some of them can speak with you across millennia.
  14. There are dualities within the dream, but the dream isn't real and is within the absolute. The Bhagavad Gita compares the cosmos to a necklace, which is worn by God. It is not a duality for God to wear a necklace which is made of its own substance; the separation is only apparent, not real. The absolute understands itself, but you and I are only its essence, within apparent forms. The human mind can't comprehend it, but the essence does. What I'm sharing is in all major mystic writings, and is my direct realization. I don't ask you to agree or disagree, I'm simply sharing and you can take it as you like.
  15. Prayer is the absolute unconditionally resonating, in anticipation of a possible dream expression, or in the silent harmony of itself.
  16. It's a sign of healing. People laugh when I analogize it to dissolving demons, but it's just like that. Or like a river current finally breaking through an ancient log jam that has kept it damned. The blocked energy from resistance is released, and freely returns to its unconditional source. It requires integrity and courage to let it happen, but absolute love reinforces itself when realized, and eventually becomes irresistible.
  17. It was a genuine question. You referred to realizing dreamless awareness earlier and I was trying to clarify what you meant. As far as impossible division goes, we agree on that. How the absolute interacts with its dream is beyond comprehension, but people keep pounding their heads against the mystery as if they can some day solve it. They can't, you can't, and nobody can. It is only directly realized.
  18. Being in the flow state doesn't guarantee form happiness, but it does provide an absolute anchor, and enhances the quality of every experience that is unconditionally allowed.
  19. Something worth pondering that I came across yesterday: To eschew unreality and seek the reality is scientific. Absolute truth is science fully realized. The IS becomes the OUGHT.
  20. If not just everyone, but all this, has the same essence, labels (solipsism, selfishness, narcissism) are seen for the false conceptual boundaries that they are.
  21. It's good that you recognize the apparent past and future as illusions within the dream. Do you also see the illusions of the apparent now? The absolute within and beyond all of this is unbound by the appearance of past, present, and future. It is timeless, motionless, and changeless. What appears to be happening now is also part of the dream. You mentioned the undreaming mind. That is the absolute, and all change appearing within the cosmos is only illusion, or the absolute appearing to be what it is not. It is not absolute reality.
  22. Have you considered that living sanely (i.e., realizing what is happening in this moment rather than denying it), provides perspective, creates freedom to respond rather than react, and enhances the quality of the life experience?