Moksha

@Breakingthewall I don’t feel chasing experiences leads to awakening, but once awake you can enjoy experiences lucidly without an ulterior motive. It is amazing how the simplest experience, like walking your dog down a tree-lined street, can be entirely transformed when thoughts recede and there is only being, without naming. The moment expands and you see the sameness underlying all beings, even the apparent space between them. It is all the phenomenal expression of underlying reality. When you are going through DNOS, it is a downward spiral of suffering that is all the worse for having been free of suffering for so long. Like Lucifer being in heaven, and then cast down to hell, deprived of the glory he took for granted. Practices like meditation that brought serenity before are seen to be empty offerings, which have no value of themselves until they are accepted. The suffering intensifies until you finally open your eyes to the wisdom and grace in DNOS. It becomes undeniable that not only are you nothing without God, but you are nothing with God. The shadow self identified as you eventually dissolves into reunion with the glory of your ultimate nature.

As I understand your experience, twice you broke through the void to realize the infinite abundance of ultimate reality. That is something you know, and can wish to realize again. For me, there was an awakening which was profound enough that I felt it would last forever. It transformed my life, and my suffering dissolved. (Un)Fortunately the blissful state only lasted for 7 months. Then I was plunged into the dark night. I couldn’t understand why or how this happened. It lasted for over a year, during which I was absent from these forums. I read “Dark Night of the Soul” with commentary from Mirabai Starr and found it enormously helpful. It resonated deeply with my own experience. She explained that DNOS is not wishing for something you don’t know, but seeing the face of God and then being banished from its presence. The seeing makes the absence all the more painful. It grinds you down until there is nothing you desire more deeply than reunion with God. God is only a name, which like all names falls short of describing ultimate reality. I see it as a powerful pointer to the holiness and wholeness of the Self which is who we truly are.

@Breakingthewall Great insights. The pathway to God-realization is different for each of us. There are examples of mystics from Vyasa to Teresa of Avila to Siddhartha who directly realized their ultimate nature as God without 5 meo. I agree that there are glimpses of ultimate reality, and there are bombs. Usually the bomb doesn’t explode until the self desires nothing more desperately or deeply than reunion with God, even if the reunion means annihilation. A while back I shared a stanza from St. John of the Cross where he compared awakening to God breaking the neck of the self, in an act of divine love that was its dissolution and the direct realization of being God. I feel this is why the dark night of the soul is so often necessary before full awakening occurs. The suffering of separation must reach such intensity that even the drive for self-survival surrenders to the love of God. All along, it is God dreaming of reunion with itself, and usually the nightmare is necessary before awakening occurs.

Consciousness can use the mind to communicate and create, but its essential nature is beyond words. it is vastly intelligent and wise, but it is also infinitely still. Sometimes it is referred to as the silent Witness of life. For me, it feels like a flood of love and light, although those words are only pointers.

Detaching from fear and desire is the pathway to the end of suffering. I agree with @Leo Gura that this is not necessarily the same as God-realization, although it certainly paves the way. The reverse is also true: God-realization facilitates dissolving attachments. They are seen to be futile striving for happiness outside of ourselves, when our true nature is already infinitely abundant.

When you fully awaken to your ultimate nature, you see the essential sameness of yourself in all beings. It is not only realizing that you are God, but that God is all.

Partial awakening (including solipsism) is more frightening than full awakening. The conditioned mind is still fighting for survival because it lacks the wisdom to let go. Like a rocket climbing into the stratosphere, the forces opposing the ascent beyond yourself increase until gravity is gone and there is only free space. Enlightenment is the most liberating, profoundly enjoyable way to live. Life loses its melodrama. You are finally free to live creatively in this moment, lucidly enjoying the dream for what it is. There is no fear, only the serene wisdom that nothing ultimately real can be threatened.

Ultimately, this is true. Why else would Consciousness create the cosmos, than to enjoy the dream of otherness, experience, and sensation? It is the story it tells itself of progression from suffering to lucidity within the dream. Thankfully, it is not only possible but our deepest purpose to awaken to our true nature, even within the shadow boundaries of relative reality. Then the profound enjoyment of this moment becomes possible, until the dream ends and the wave returns to the ocean of itself.

I agree. Ultimately, wisdom is the depthless, seamless state of unfettered Mind. It is beyond the cosmos, and within relative reality when Mind chooses to awaken to itself, wisdom flows through the form of its creation. It is undifferentiated light shining through the differentiated form, realizing the form is only an appearance, but through this realization experiencing sensation in the purest flow state possible within the dream. By contrast, foolishness is unconscious living. Mind has not yet chosen to realize itself within the form, and decisions are driven by the fear and desire of the conditioned self-mind. It is the futile pursuit of happiness which can only truly be realized within.

The conditioned mind is like a block of rough-hewn obsidian which is too dense to allow light to shine through. In the spiritual workshop it is carefully sculpted into a beautiful pane of translucent glass, and becomes a lucid medium for the Mind. I don’t call it an achievement, because the mind cannot sculpt itself on the relative plane of its existence. It requires the vast wisdom and creativity of the Artist for the transformation to occur. Sometimes it is a careful process of spiritual practice, through which the mind is gradually shaped. Other times, as in my case, it is a cataclysmic event, which is the culmination and eventual collapse of suffering. Although initially the mind may believe it is carving itself, when the light finally floods through the Mind is realized to have been preparing its own expression all along.

@Razard86 Exactly, anything externalized, including rituals, concepts, sensations, beliefs, and even feelings are distractions from Self-realization. The answer to our ultimate nature is carefully hidden within, and can only be directly realized. @Breakingthewall I agree, true realization is never a belief or thought. It is direct, and indescribable. Enlightened teachers can create words as pointers, but if the words are clung to they cannot direct people to the underlying truth that they are intended to convey. I feel this is why great teachers like Ramana Maharshi choose silence and spaciousness as the most powerful pointer to truth.

We already have access to vast wisdom; most of us just haven't realized it yet. It is the pathway to liberation. We have been conditioned to trust logic as the way to enlightenment, when in truth it is an obstacle. Even in relative reality, logic breaks down at the extremes of astrophysics and quantum physics. It is an ego trap when we confuse conceptualization with Mind. There is only the One Mind and not a particle of anything else on which to lay hold...If you students of the Way do not awake to this Mind substance, you will overlay Mind with conceptual thought, you will seek the Buddha outside yourselves, and you will remain attached to forms, pious practices and so on, all of which are harmful and not at all the way to supreme knowledge. - Huang Po

Let go of the dictionary and the need to conceptualize spirituality. God is an equally triggering term for many people. It is not about what the mind finds interesting, logical, or paradoxical. Whatever you call ultimate reality, it cannot be comprehended. It is only directly realized, beyond words. For some reason, this conversation keeps reminding me of the poem "Songs of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross. Especially this passage: He wounded my neck And all my senses were suspended. I lost myself. Forgot myself. When the senses, thoughts, and feelings are suspended, it is a grace by that which is beyond the cosmos. We can't choose to make it happen, only prepare ourselves for it. The self dissolves into ultimate reality, in the same way a wave of the ocean surrenders to the depthless stillness that created it.

I agree, it's not a thing. It is beyond everything, and within everything. I am not referring to human awareness, but to the essence of God. Call it whatever you want, no word does it justice.

^^^ People are digging themselves into a conceptual grave by applying subject > object relative reality logic to ultimate reality. It all collapses into the singularity that is Consciousness. If that word doesn't point for people, maybe Void or No-Self or Love or God helps more. It is not about the words, but about directly realizing the reality that they describe. Rather than grokking your way into awareness, let go of the need to conceptualize and prepare for the grace of being. It happens when You choose for it to happen, and when it does enjoy the dream lucidly without trying to explain it.

Perhaps awareness is reflection for you. You might consider whether the awareness you have experienced in meditation must be the same awareness others have realized. Your frequent reference to conceptualizations and dualities feels like you are thinking awareness rather than being awareness. Direct awareness of the ultimate seamless state is the most holy and profound realization, which dissolves me in the serene light of God. It is grace, not an achievement. It erases all boundaries and breaks all chains. There is no suffering in this moment, only the eternal wordless echo of Hallelujah. As Ram Dass describes it: I instantly felt a new, profound kind of peace I'd never before experienced. I had just found the "I" - that perceptual point of view, that essence of identity, that scanning device. I'd found that place of awareness beyond form, where "I" exists independent of social and psychological roles. This "I" was beyond time and space. And this "I" -knew-, it really -knew-. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it and was one with it. I felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for affirmation and reassurance was over. Now all I needed was to look within, to that place where I -knew-. I was just -presence-, unfettered by the usual slipstream of random thoughts, images, and sensations. I nestled into this sense of pure -being-, feeling my way into this timeless, inner self that was independent of outer identity. I felt no need to -do- anything.

I like Aldous Huxley's summary. 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

Words have a way of tripping people up, especially when it comes to explaining the unexplainable. Why would awareness require reflection? As I define reflection, it is thought-based. Awareness has no thoughts. In the ultimate state, it is simply aware of itself. This is why I asked whether you have realized Awareness in meditation. I'm not referring to a conceptual realization, but to direct realization of ultimate reality. The realization is devoid of any thought. It is a profound resonance of sameness realizing itself.

As a kid, I had a strange dream that I still remember vividly. I dreamed that I dreamed that I was dreaming. My dream character dreamed its own dream character. It still confuses me, but somehow it made sense at the time ? Consciousness casts a stone into a still pond and creates ever-expanding ripples until they finally de-concentrically resolve back into the pond. It feels like there is not just one layer of creation, but layers upon layers. The creativity of Consciousness is limitless.

In its ultimate state Awareness, or Consciousness if you prefer, is aware of and conscious of nothing but itself. It is absolute, raw, unfettered awareness with no object to be aware of. It is the eternal Self-aware subject. The cosmos, and every object in it, is created by Consciousness to experience the phenomena of sensations, thoughts, and feelings which don't exist in ultimate reality. You can directly realize this, even within the dream. Have you never been Consciousness, in this moment, with no object to focus your awareness on but itself? That epiphany is the point and purpose of meditation. The Self, pure awareness, shines as the light within the heart, surrounded by the senses. Only seeming to think, seeming to move, the Self neither sleeps nor wakes nor dreams. - Katha 4.1.7

Exactly. This is why spiritual bypassing doesn't work. To awaken within the dream, you have to go the full gauntlet your ultimate Self demands, before it shows its face. It is easy to claim enlightenment, but it will never happen until you have drunk life to the bitter dregs.

Well said. The ego is not the enemy, only identification with it, which always leads to suffering. When Consciousness chooses to awaken within, you realize there is nothing the cosmos can do to harm you. You take life less seriously. It is dreaming lucidly. You realize your ultimate nature as Consciousness, but choose to enjoy the dream through the character you create. It becomes the most beautiful, creative, abundant part of the dream. You also realize the avatar, and every other avatar within the dream, is simply an expression of yourself. They have no free will of their own, so how can they be judged?

Who is aware in the present moment? If there's no external world (and ultimately, there isn't), then the person claiming to be aware as Consciousness is no more ultimately real than anyone else. Why would that person's POV be any more objectively real than another person's POV who has had the same realization? Whatever you are perceiving in the moment is whatever Consciousness chooses to perceive through your particular form. That may or may not be the same as what Consciousness chooses to perceive through other forms. It is all Consciousness, playing the game of awakening to itself within the dream. Solipsism is blindness to the Consciousness that imbues every form that it creates. It is the false idea that Consciousness only has the capacity to realize itself within your form, but not within other forms inhabiting its dream.

@michaelcycle00 Only whose POV exists? The POV is bound to the relative nature of each being. Ultimately there is no POV, just as there are no separate beings. It is all Consciousness dreaming itself into apparent differentiation. Within the dream, your being is no more real than the being of anyone else. It is only a relative seeming of separation. Awakening is like lucid dreaming. It is the realization of the seamlessness of Consciousness, even from within the dream. The limitation of solipsism is that Consciousness is still binding itself to the POV of the character, and is unwilling to realize itself throughout the cosmos.

Separation is an egoic concept. Imaginary lines are necessary for the cosmos to exist, but aren't ultimately real. Consciousness appears to be separate from itself, but it is only an appearance. Solipsism is a partial awakening to your ultimate nature, but fails to realize that every being in the cosmos is no more real or unreal than you. Consciousness is in all beings, and all beings dissolve into it. It is all the same Consciousness. They see the same Self in a spiritual aspirant and an outcaste, in an elephant, a cow, and a dog.