Moksha

Exactly. The deeper you develop the capacity to remain clear, without losing yourself in imagination, the less you suffer. It's impossible to suffer when you are in the flow state.

"Harmonization of the mind happens naturally when your awareness remains focused on the absolute light within." You seem to be agreeing with this, and if so why are you seeing direct realization as having anything to do with understanding your mental patterns? Enlightenment is letting go of mental patterns, because you no longer identify with them. You don't need to understand them to dissolve them, you just need to directly understand who you are.

There's no limit to the levels you can explore within the dream. As a kid, I remember dreaming that I was dreaming that I was dreaming. It's like an endless hall of mirrors, each mirror reflecting the mirror in front of it, and projecting its reflection to the mirror behind. No wonder awareness so easily loses itself within reflection. If you want to escape the mirror trap, stop reflecting.

I was making a general observation. I have no idea how egotistical you are. Exploring experience is only egotistical to the extent that you identify with the experience, and attach expectations to it. My point is that imagination is the opposite of enlightenment. Experiencing the cosmos as an imaginary human, imagining that it is an alien, only buries you deeper in the dream. You are only awake to the degree that you directly realize who you are, beyond every form. A good litmus test is your baseline rate of suffering. If you only escape suffering by engaging in mind games, and find yourself constantly returning to suffering, you aren't awake yet.

@Adam M It's a trap to endlessly pursue imagination. So many people on this forum fall into it (including @Leo Gura). Yes, gods, aliens, and dragons exist within the absolute, but they are no more real than you are. Exotic forms are tantalizing to the mind, but diving into them is like throwing yourself onto barbed wire, over and over again, until you are bloody and exhausted by it all. Losing your awareness in form identity, whether it's this form, or some other imaginary form, is the opposite of awakening. It is egoic and binds you to suffering, regardless of the form that you pursue. Awakening is the absolute directly realizing itself, beyond imagination. It is freely channeling the light of your true nature. You still explore experience, but lucidly and unconditionally, without drowning in the suffering of false identification.

The ego doesn't actually die, since it isn't real. It's just a mask worn by the absolute, which it mistakes for itself. Awakening is temporarily removing the mask, and enlightenment is tossing the mask off the stage.

I appreciate what @Water by the River brings to the forum. He not only shares insights that have deepened his spiritual journey, but I feel he sincerely strives to integrate what he has realized.

You don't dissolve mental patterns by using more mental patterns to understand them. That would be adding fuel to the fire. Harmonization of the mind happens naturally when your awareness remains focused on the absolute light within.

Creativity purifies because it requires an unobstructed channel. Purity creates because it allows an unobstructed channel.

@Soul Flight Your destiny is determined by your desire: You are what your deep, driving desire is. As you desire it, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny. - Upanishads You're right that enlightenment is the pinnacle state of being, within the dream. You become free, and are able to enjoy experience without being afflicted by it. There are still obstacles to overcome and goals to achieve, but you are able to enjoy the journey without being attached to the outcome. It is direct living, unfiltered by false desires, which are inevitably unfulfilling. The peace of your true nature is always present, regardless of what happens around you. Most people spend their lives suffering. They don't desire to suffer, but suffering is the result of their desires. It's the karma of their actions. Eventually, we learn to leverage our suffering to create space from the conditioned mind, and realize the absolute within. It's not greedy to desire freedom from suffering, and pursue the truth of who you are. It's the purest expression of love.

You are the hand guiding the puppet to create and eventually consume its dharma. Eventually, the puppet is removed and your true identity is revealed. You are the absolute within which Holy Fools and Idiot Savants are born and die.

@gettoefl Judgment is the sword wielded by the absolute to defend itself from imaginary foes. When it lays down the sword, relinquishing judgment, it realizes that there never was any separation.

This is true. The spiritual journey is about realizing what is real and what is not. It is a spiritual, not a conceptual, realization. God can't awaken to itself through the mind, only through direct realization. The mind is a helpful tool to guide you to the gate, but passing through requires relinquishing identity.

?Realizing this, how can there be judgment? Regardless of the tree's stage of growth, we are all the same light that sustains it.

Existence is everything, and excludes nothing. Easy enough to conceptually comprehend. People are born into the cosmos, and lose themselves within it, as if they and it were absolutely real. What the mind will never understand, and can only be directly realized, is that the unveiled absolute is beyond everything and nothing, form and formlessness, existence and non-existence.

The senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, sound) are neurological representations of the cosmos, filtered by the sense organs of the creature. Even if the cosmos was absolutely real, the senses are only a second order representation of it. The mental image of a desert cactus is not the actual cactus, just an internal interpretation of it. Directly, the cosmos isn't objectively real. Its dimensions are subjective, based on the state of the observer. For example, time is not absolute. It passes more slowly for a faster moving object, relative to a slower moving object. This isn't theoretical; we use the fact of relativity to make corrections in navigational systems, for example. Direct realization is the absolute realizing itself, beyond external phenomena. It awakens to the reality of itself. It is not a sensual experience. The spiritual journey culminates in spiritual realization. How is spirit subject to sensation? It is the absolute realizing itself within the form. As realization deepens, awareness pans out beyond the form, dissolving all apparent boundaries.

Awakening is direct knowledge, beyond the senses.

I'm glad you asked, even rhetorically, because it bears directly on understanding absolute reality. God is not a giant doorknob to be figured out; it is the inconceivable, paradoxical reality imagining the doorknob, while being beyond imagination. It directly realizes itself, or not at all.

It is absolute awareness withdrawing from its misidentification with an illusory form, and realizing its essence. The light of god is direct, and beyond physical sensation and mental perceptions.

Science seems to have made enormous progress mapping out the rules of the cosmos. Still, our collective knowledge as humans after 13.7 billion years of evolution is a grain on the infinite shore of relative reality. The pursuit of knowledge has proven how malleable subjective reality is. At least we've realized that time and space aren't fixed dimensions, but depend on the perspective of the observer. Absolute reality can only be realized directly, beyond the senses, by the absolute.

@Yimpa ?You swim out to sea, not realizing that the farther you go, the greater your risk of drowning in suffering. Eventually grace catches you in the undercurrent, and brings you back to the shore.

The boundaries of existence are defined by dualities. Thoughts, emotions, and experiences are bound along an arc between polarities. It's impossible to circumnavigate the dream without experiencing its extremes. If you travel to the north pole, eventually you must also travel to the south pole. Within each form, awareness oscillates between dualities, like the pendulum of a clock. Some clocks are tall (e.g., humans, aliens, and gods), and the pendulum sweeps across a relatively larger arc. Other clocks are tiny (e.g., pebbles, droplets, and quarks), with a commensurately smaller arc. Regardless of the range, every form necessitates an arc, along which awareness travels. Awakening is the absolute realizing itself within a form, and frees it from the form's parochial perspective. It pans out, to a vast panoramic view. The pendulum still swings, slowly and from a great distance, but awareness is no longer lost within the formal arc. This is the pinnacle of the dream experience. You live directly and freely, and within the dream you fly.

Well and truly said, see my sig⚡

Words like bliss and love mean different things to people. As I define bliss, it is unconditional being, free from illusions and suffering. As I define love, it is the reality of absolute sameness, beyond the appearance of differences. I see these differently than the human emotions of bliss and love, which no matter how hard we try to hold onto them, always slip through our fingers. It is impossible for human bliss and love to last forever. Like every duality, they eventually necessitate the opposite. If you are awake, you can anchor your awareness in absolute bliss and love, even within the dream. Human emotions still come and go, as they must. Absolute bliss and love are perpetual, and can be perpetually realized within the dream.

@Yimpa Spirituality is counterintuitive. The survival instinct is to control externally, but to be free we have to surrender within. It's the opposite of what the conditioned mind believes is in our best interest. As you're realizing, rather than being satiated, desires become more ravenous the more you feed them. I recently read an article by a doctor who found that the more his fortune grew, the greater his desires became: But man’s desires are never ending. As the salary kept increasing so the desires and needs. There's nothing wrong with having desires, as long as they are held loosely, without our happiness depending on them being fulfilled. Any conditions we place on life eventually bind us to the wheel of suffering. Observing this self-destructive pattern is the first step toward dissolving it. The journey is not about willpower, which is just another form of control. All you need is sincerity and patience. The light within you does the rest.