Moksha

Instead of relying on memory (which isn't real), realize pure bliss, peace, love, and silence, which is what you absolutely are. The absolute allows glimpses of this, where it stops identifying as a person bound by space and time, but then returns to entanglement with the dream. Mind-habits have to be let go of entirely. It only seems scary, because you are identified with the ego, which isn't real. In pure bliss, peace, love, and silence there is nothing to be scared of. How to let go? Hear truth, contemplate without conceptualizing it, and be it. Easier said than done, but still possible, especially when aided by the severing blade of suffering.

It is the seamless essence of the witness and the witnessed, appearing to be what it is not.

Your instinct about the illusory nature of subject > object is correct. The absolute is beyond witness and witnessed. Awareness doesn't require an object, any more than intelligence or love or freedom. These are unconditional facets of the absolute, not attributes, seamless like an infinite diamond.

Happy birthday, @Leo Gura! ? So many protostars within the cosmos, and I'm glad we crossed orbits within this little system of the infinite.

All states are imaginary. In their essence, they are still the absolute, but appearing as what they are not.

From the materialist (or relative) perspective, it isn't necessary to destroy your life, only to disidentify from it. Not only can you lucidly adventure through the dream, but doing so rooted in absolute love allows you to experience the cosmos without being consumed by it.

You can't destroy what doesn't exist. The absolute is. The appearance of forgetting and remembering itself is imagination.

@UnbornTao The absolute has been called a state, but I see it as beyond states, all of which imply change. Direct realization is a state because it is the intersection of absolute and relative reality. It is the appearance of awakening, but ultimately there is nothing to awaken. Remove the appearance of the relative, and states dissolve along with it.

Aka awakening within the dream ?

Direct realization is still a state of consciousness, but closer to letting go of all states. If you want to watch the movie, you have to pay the price of admission, even if the cost is the lowest denomination of imagination.

@playdoh You got this ?

@Breakingthewall Yes, it is all the absolute. The idea of "inner" vs. "outer" is a deception. You can directly realize this, even within the apparent separation of the dream. When you do, every phenomenal experience is filtered by absolute love. There is no desire to find love, because you already unconditionally are.

@Breakingthewall If there is no outside of you to look for love, why are you still looking? Desire is seeing a difference where there is none.

@Breakingthewall You are looking for love, without realizing that you are already depthless love. Every desire, even the desire for love, is a misidentification with the cosmos. Desires and fears comprise the meteor field of the mind. The absolute creates this field to imagine moving through relative reality, but it is not actual. Freedom is when the absolute realizes itself directly by letting go of desires and fears, so only its true essence remains to be clearly seen.

Before concerning yourself with letting go of identity, first realize who you actually are. You won't be ready for it otherwise, and without the grounding of direct realization it could do more harm than good. You need to be anchored in the absolute. Make sure the kite is intact and the grip on the string is sure, before releasing it into the wind.

Instead of asking how to know if someone is awake, ask whether what they teach helps you along the inner path to the absolute. Rather than asking how to make others know you are awake, ask whether what you teach reflects your inner path to the absolute. There's truth to the maxim that "by their fruits ye shall know them", but the fruit still grows on other trees. Produce good fruit yourself, and you won't be distracted by whether others do or don't.

Imprisonment = Form identification and gratification Freedom = Form dissolution and love I suppose you could call love selfless desire, or the unconditional expression of the absolute, but that isn't what most people mean by desire.

Good for you, It's for your own sake For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

Desires and fears are always attachments. This includes the desire to be free and the fear of not being loved. The deeper you realize the absolute, the more tenuous even these desires become.

Relative reality is ironic that way.

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The deeper you realize the absolute, the harder it will be for others to understand. Even awakening is rare, let alone enlightening. It dissolves boundaries, and you see the same essence in everything, regardless of apparently different states of identification. I don't talk about it much with my loved ones. Instead, I silently love them. You are flying higher, and seeing clearer, so what do you do now? You can enjoy the solo flight, or periodically choose to rejoin the flock and help them fly for themselves. I haven't thought about "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" for decades, but it has been in my mind lately. I relate to Jonathan at a deeper level than when I first pondered the analogy. Some people see it on the surface as a child's story, but it is luminous in its depths. A lot of quotes, but hopefully they will resonate in some way that is helpful: “Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flights–how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.” “You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch the perfect speed. And it isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.” “For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as means to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.” “His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that the other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.” “’Why is it,’ Jonathan puzzled, ‘that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?’” “For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.” “He spoke of very simple things–It is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition out limitation in any form.” “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation.” “Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.” “The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.” “‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom,’ Jonathan said. ‘There is no other.’”

I only trust direct knowledge. I have no judgment toward others on their individual path to the absolute. Everyone is navigating their own apparent boat on their own apparent river, sailing into the same ocean.

People talk a lot about ego death, but talk is cheap. It is one thing to taunt the enemy on the battlefield, but victory is realizing the wisdom of laying down your sword and walking away. Without attention, the ego has no choice but to dissolve.

Desires and fears are minimally necessary to survive within the dream, far less than most people realize. Instead of chaining yourself, you can hold the thin string of the kite and allow it to fly.