Moksha

You believe that I believe We agree on the emptiness of beliefs. Some read "The entire universe is suspended from me as my necklace of jewels" and create a belief based on these words. Others directly realize the meaning beyond the words. Within the dream there are deeper levels of realization. Then again, it is just a dream. The more lucid you are, the flimsier the dream (including you) becomes.

The suchness-nowness-presence-awareness (I'll call it God) that you realize in meditation is God, but not all God is in your realization. Not all God is even within the cosmos. The cosmos comes and goes as an expression of God, but God still is. More words, but maybe the meaning will resonate with you: There is nothing that exists separate from me, Arjuna. The entire universe is suspended from me as my necklace of jewels. - Bhagavad Gita 7:8-11

All beliefs are delusions. There is only direct realization. I can tell you that I see the sameness in everything, but at best it is a pointer and at worst it will mislead you from yourself. Teachings are scribbles on the map, and should be taken with an ocean's worth of salt. They are not the territory.

Enlightenment isn't the end of desire. It is the end of identification with desire. When you are lucid within the dream, you no longer seek external fulfillment. Your true nature is Self-sufficient. Nothing can threaten you. You still enjoy sensations, but no longer take the tiny planet you're living on so seriously. As Krishnamurti said when asked about enlightenment: I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes. Equanimity is rare, but so is enlightenment. God prefers a gradual spiritual path for the vast majority of its avatars. People call themselves enlightened without understanding what it means. It is not a belief or an insight. It is God seeing clearly, within its dream. On solipsism, I was referring to the traditional definition. If you define solipsism as the mind of God, of course it's true. Most people don't mean that though. They only realize God within their avatar, without realizing the entirety of God throughout and beyond the cosmos. Seamless seeing is not a conceptualization. It is a direct realization. They see the same Self in a spiritual aspirant and an outcaste, in an elephant, a cow, and a dog. - Bhagavad Gita 5:18

Awakening is easy, as long as you have no preferences. If you want to test whether you are awake, honestly assess whether there are any desires or fears in your life. If you cling to any pleasure, however small, or resist any pain, however great, you aren't fully awake. People claim they want to realize God, but they are fooling themselves. God isn't getting what you want, and avoiding what you hate. Equanimity is the litmus test of enlightenment. Whatever is occurring in this moment is precisely what you are giving yourself, as God. It doesn't mean being a doormat for life, but denying reality is the definition of insanity, and the opposite of enlightenment. When you don't mind anything, and allow the experiences of life to flow through you freely, you see with clear eyes. The forms of snake, sunset, Trump, Jesus, enemy, and friend dissolve and you realize the same God within and beyond them all. Solipsism is a narcissistic half-truth, which is blind to the ubiquity of God.

Self-affirmations can help in the doing dimension of life, but they are still conceptual in nature. Reprogramming the mind is more about letting go of thoughts and feelings entirely. Instead of resisting or clinging to them, which only crystallizes them within your psyche, allow their underlying energy to freely flow through you. This cleanses your conditioned mind, disssolving its attachments and aversions. It is healing and restores your mind to its original spacious state. There are no more barriers to the Consciousness within, and it is free to shine its light and love through you.

Most people are unconscious, and you might say demons are anti-conscious. Such stubborn Self-denial ?

The more Self-aware you become, the less society frustrates you. You realize that they are you, and you are them. Love is liberating.

The greatest story ever told is not just your story or my story. It is the interwoven expressions of the infinite. Even an interim realization like he shared puts the problems of our tiny dream into perspective, and makes the complaining and gloating of our character fade into insignificance. Mystics have gone deeper, and realized the profound joy which is possible when the dream is lived lucidly. What the acid voidwalker didn’t seem to realize on that particular trip is the blazing sun of light and love on the other side of the void, which is his true nature.

Enlightenment doesn't turn you into a Vulcan with no emotions. You still feel the energy of emotions arise in the moment. The difference is that rather than amplifying them by clinging or resisting, you let them flow through you. Flow state for the win.

The beautiful aspect of dualities is they create a sense of movement, progression, and experience. They may only be imagination, but even for God they serve a purpose. Imagine being formless, changeless, and timeless. God is not bored, but neither is it excited. It is light and love, but without creation, how is this light and love manifested? It is all God, dreaming the cosmos into existence and collapsing it into nothingness, in an infinite divine cycle. Science supports the expansion and contraction of the cosmos, but mystics realized it millennia ago. Take the numbers below as symbolic, and realize the deeper meaning of the insight: The Day of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas and the Night of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas. When the day of Brahma dawns, forms are brought forth from the Unmanifest; when the night of Brahma comes, these forms merge in the Formless again. This multitude of beings is created and destroyed again and again in the succeeding days and nights of Brahma. But beyond this formless state there is another, unmanifested reality, which is eternal and is not dissolved when the cosmos is destroyed. - Bhagavad Gita 8:17-20

This conversation is an example of why it was realized in the Upanishads that "Words turn back frightened." Some words are better pointers than others, but all are arrows on a crudely drawn map, not the actual territory. I have seen that some words are unhelpful pointers for people, either because they trigger a negatively conditioned past (e.g., God), or because they are taken literally when they are only symbols pointing to a profound wordless reality. Consciousness is a great example of the latter. It has a certain meaning in common parlance, related to being awake and aware of your physical surroundings. In the spiritual sense, Consciousness points to an infinitely deeper reality. It is the mind of God, and everything it expresses. When gurus speak of Consciousness, place their words in this deeper context, and perhaps you will realize the true meaning of the message.

@axiom Thank you, and I appreciate your tone as well. It's a melody of notes God is creating within itself ?

You know by now that when I say "your true nature" I am referring to God within each avatar that appears to be separate but actually isn't. Of course there is a you, from the ultimate perspective. You are everything and every nothing, and beyond both. The dream is an expression of God, but in different apparent states of awareness. In some avatars it has chosen to realize its true nature, and in others it has not, all within the dream. This awareness exponentially elevates the dream experience. If you have awakened, you know this. The quality of life after awakening, especially as the attachments of the avatar mind begin to dissolve, is joy and serenity that surpass understanding. Yes, it is all within the dream. You are God within the avatar before awakening, and are God within the avatar after awakening. But you are still God within the dream, and you are not yet liberated from the dream. The avatar has no power to perpetuate anything, including the dream. It is all God creating the dream, and within the avatar choosing to see or not to see itself. That choice transforms the dream entirely.

Are you denying that you’re still in the dream? You have realized it is a dream, but are still bound by it. Telling yourself that it isn’t real won”t improve your dream experience. You created the dream for a reason, and it goes beyond the realization to expressing your true nature within the dream.

The progression of spiritual realization: 1) I am creation 2) I am the void 3) I am creation and the void, and beyond these dualities I am God

It seems silly now that you have awakened to no-self Tomorrow, in 10 years, or maybe not in the lifetime of this avatar, it could seem similarly silly to claim it is impossible to realize whether or not the cosmos is ultimately real. You never know what is around the next corner of the dream. The key is to stay open, and prepare yourself, for deeper realizations that your ultimate Self is willing to see within your avatar. The profound difference between direct realization and conceptualization is that truth is no longer up for debate. It is beyond ideas and what seems to be, as you must have seen when you directly realized no-self. You are still bound by the dream, as all of us are. Self is more lucid in some avatars than in others, but it is still within the dream. Realizing ultimate reality is awe-inspiring, but afterwards you still get to chop wood and carry water. Done lucidly, even mundane tasks take on a quality that is unimaginable to avatars within whom the Self still patiently waits to realize itself.

Before you awakened to no-self, what would you have said if you were told that you are not ultimately real? Perhaps something like the above, replacing "space and time" with "I". Is it possible that others have directly realized the cosmos is not ultimately real? In both cases, the realizations of others are irrelevant to your own realization. But you might consider whether a similar direct realization about the cosmos is possible, regardless of whether Consciousness has realized it yet within you. Not a bad translation, it has a deeper meaning than the words seem to indicate, similar to Christian teachings. You keep referring to ultimate reality, which is fine, but do you acknowledge that as Consciousness you are still within the avatar in your dream? If so, does lucid dreaming affect the quality of the dream, compared to unconscious dreaming?

My reference to "you have never done anything and will never do anything" was a direct quote from this thread Apathy does not imply there is someone there to be apathetic. It implies that Consciousness has not yet realized itself within that avatar. The entire cosmos is illusory, not just the appearance of the self. Space and time do not ultimately exist, only relatively. Lucidity means true seeing. In the spiritual context, a lucid dream is simply Consciousness realizing itself while indwelling an avatar in the cosmos. The avatar doesn't realize or choose anything on its own. It is all Consciousness, which includes but is beyond the avatar, calling the shots. The dream is the entire cosmos, and awakening does not cause the cosmos to disappear. It is simply the direct realization by Consciousness that it is not the form it currently inhabits within the dream. It still goes through the dream knowing this, but navigates it with Self-realized wisdom, creativity, and love. One person in many thousands may seek perfection, yet of these only a few reach the goal and come to realize me. - Bhagavad Gita 7:3 The above doesn't imply that a separate person autonomously seeks perfection and attains enlightenment. It is Consciousness within that person that takes this dream journey.

By mocking and apathy, I'm referring to the neo-advaita platitudes about spirituality: This life is an empty illusion; you have never done anything and will never do anything, so why care about living joyfully and with love? Advaita answers that yes, life is an illusion created by Brahman but for a divine purpose. It is true that there is no journey, no growth, and no enlightenment in ultimate reality. These are the reasons Brahman created the cosmos. It treasures the dream of journey, of growth, and of enlightenment. The purpose of life is to undertake and realize this journey, as mystics of every spiritual tradition have realized. When the purpose is fulfilled, Brahman rewards itself with a flood of divine resonance, which is experienced in the avatar as joy, creativity, and love which surpass all understanding. Thoughts and emotions still happen after enlightenment, but the difference is that you no longer identify with them. When they are positive, you no longer cling to them and when they are negative, you no longer resist them. It is the sublime state of lucid dreaming. Far better than the self-perpetuated suffering which condemns us to a hellish existence until we are ready to realize our true nature. Claiming that both states are simply appearance and already perfect denies this transformative distinction within the dream. As long as you are bound to the dream, why not lucidly celebrate it? It is why you created the dream in the first place. I agree that the royal secret is absolute directness, without the illusion of the self standing in the way. But absolute directness doesn't dissolve the dream. It only awakens you to the reality of being in a dream, without freeing you from it. If I am dreaming lucidly, rather than sulking in a dank cave until I die, I choose to fly.

Regular old advaita celebrates the royal secret, which far from apathy is the phenomenal joy of living lucidly within the dream: This royal knowledge, this royal secret, is the greatest purifier. Righteous and imperishable, it is a joy to practice and can be directly experienced. - Bhagavad Gita 9:2 I agree that the child is just an appearance. But its ultimate nature, which is God, is free to choose its dream adventure. The imagination of God is limitless. Why would God realize itself only to mock the foolishness of its unawakened characters, rather than loving itself by awakening within them as well?

I hear you. Life can be hell even before awakening, but that is nothing compared to feeling flooded with the love and glory of God, only to be cast out of the holy presence like Lucifer. Especially when you didn't do anything wrong!?! After falling what seems like forever through the void, God catches you again, and this time there is an even deeper awe. The resonance with your ultimate nature is at a higher frequency. You realize that the psyche has become thinner than it was before, from the grinding darkness of the void, and the light of God shines through more brightly still. The banishment turns out to be an act of divine love, and what you needed all along. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend "Dark Night of the Soul", especially the translation and commentary by Mirabai Starr: This is a path of annihilation of the ego. But we must first be brought home to ourselves before we can bear to see our nothingness before God…It is less for those who are struggling to find themselves than it is for the ones who have a clear sense of self and are ready to purify it… This is a path for those who use their suffering as a tool for transformation. In the dark night of each soul, we are simultaneously annihilated and immeasurably strengthened.

@Razard86 ? @axiom How neo-advaita of you But not so seriously, when a child discovers there is no Santa Claus, where is the joy in Christmas? He could retire to a cave for the rest of his life, dejected by the dissolving of his illusion. Or he could realize the deeper meaning of love that the mythological being represents, and is his true nature. Either way, he hasn't left the dream yet. Why not celebrate it lucidly, and love his way through life? The realization makes the mystery of life all the more amazing, and when the dam finally breaks, there is a flood of light and creativity which never would have been possible before.

@Theplay Great to hear. The pathway to enlightenment is so much simpler than most people realize, and yet so difficult that few sustainably live it. It is not about chasing insights, and all about realizing God within so deeply that attachments to aversions and desires dissolve. The wise, realizing through meditation The timeless Self, beyond all perception, Hidden in the cave of the heart, Leave pain and pleasure far behind. Those who know they are neither body nor mind But the immemorial Self, the divine Principle of existence, find the source Of all joy and live in joy abiding. - Katha 1.2:12

Meditation is my mainstay. It is like judo training for the mind. You reach the point where thoughts and emotions, no matter how apparently urgent, are allowed to flow through without grasping or resistance. They are realized to be energy patterns, nothing more. From awareness, any action required by the present moment is clearly seen. You no longer lose yourself in the melodrama of the mind. It is an amazing transformation. While life continues to throw challenges your way, they are no longer a problem, but a tempering force for deeper growth. Eventually no matter what winds blow, you are a still flame. Recommended reading: The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer The Mind Illuminated by John Yates 10% Happier by Dan Harris That said, don't worry about falling back. It happens to most of us, and is actually the pathway forward. There is a French expression, reculer pour mieux sauter, which means taking a step back to jump farther forward. Both personal and cosmic evolution have regressive cycles which lead to higher states of transcendence. All part of the conscious journey.