Moksha

Awakening does feel like coming home. However, it is only the first step in the spiritual journey. Most of us, after awakening, fall back to sleep. The challenge is to remain awake for longer periods of time, until it is a perpetual state of being.

You're right to question your thoughts. Someone told me years ago that our thoughts can't be trusted. I didn't understand at the time, but now it seems obvious. Socrates realized it when he concluded, "I neither know nor think I know." I feel this is why absolute truth can only be directly realized. It is Consciousness resonating with itself, and is entirely non-conceptual. When it happens, there is no doubt.

@Thought Art Trust your instinct. It sounds like you have had insights, but have not awakened yet. Awakening is the direct realization of absolute truth, beyond any experience. If thinking is involved, it is not awakening. It is the direct spiritual resonance with your divine nature. This enduring realization of unity, where boundaries dissolve and you see the sameness of yourself in all things, is the purpose of life. But where there is unity, one without a second, that is the world of Brahman. This is the supreme goal of life, the supreme treasure, the supreme joy. Those who do not seek this supreme goal live on but a fraction of this joy.

Similarly, just because someone doesn't realize absolute truth through suffering or meditation doesn't mean others haven't. Psychedelics are appealing, because they require less effort than these other paths. Perhaps the insights they deliver are also less sustainable. How many people have learned not to suffer on psychedelics alone? Even after I understood the need to disentangle from my attachments to get there, it has not been an easy or rapid process. Instead of the instant enlightenment I envisioned from psychedelics, it has required years of incremental practice to even begin to get free of the conditioned feelings, habits, and unconscious urges that keep rising to the surface. And it's not that they have gone or will go away, but how I identify with them as I shift more toward the soul that Maharaj-ji reflected back to me. - Ram Dass

The memories of what happens to your form identity are relatively true, compared to what doesn't happen to your form identity. Time and events exist, within the relative cosmos, but they are not ultimately real. If I dreamed last night that I was flying, it is true that this was my dream. But was I actually flying?

@Thought Art ?

@Thought Art It's human nature to look for a shortcut out of suffering. We want to believe that awakening will instantly solve all of our problems. Unfortunately, merely seeing won't do that for you. We still have decades of conditioning to deal with. Spiritual integration of insights requires sincere dedication and effort, in the context of patience and kindness toward oneself. Spiritual teachers do people a disservice when they make snake oil claims to free people from suffering, if they just sign up for this particular program, available today at 50% off. There is no easy path to enlightenment, but it is well worth taking the journey.

Good insights. I agree that anything experienced as a thought is inherently false. No thought, no writing, and no work of art can accurately describe ultimate reality. As the Upanishads say, "Words turn back frightened." God is beyond the conceptual mind to comprehend. It is only directly realized. Awakening is the opening of the third eye, and clearly seeing your ultimate nature, beyond the limitations of the senses. The conditioned mind may try to question it, but the seeing itself is spiritual, and beyond doubt.

@Thought Art I agree. To be fair, if you read Leo's teachings in context, he has always recognized the importance of integrating spiritual work with any insights gained through psychedelics. Others that I have read, like Ram Dass and Aldous Huxley, make the same observations. Awakening, whether through psychedelics or through meditation, is only the first step on the spiritual journey. Enlightenment, or being filled with light, is the purifying process of deconditioning the mind. It is developing clarity and commitment, so that rather than being distracted by desires, the mind remains a still and present flame. ?

@Strangeloop ? ?

Consciousness is pure awareness, and states only seem to change, as Consciousness navigates between them. You are the fish, and the apparent states of dreaming and waking are the banks between which you swim. It is said of these states of consciousness that in the dreaming state, when one is sleeping, the shining Self, who never dreams, who is ever awake, watches by his own light the dreams woven out of past deeds and present desires… But he is not affected by anything because he is detached and free; and after wandering here and there in the state of dreaming, enjoying pleasures and seeing good and evil, he returns to the state from which he began. As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking. You, as Consciousness, are calling the shots of your dream character.

If only they had 5-meO-DMT when the Buddha, Jesus, and the sages of the Upanishads directly realized their true nature You are them, and they are you, and not every enlightened character requires psychedelics to see the dream for what it is.

Trick question, not falling for it Awareness = Consciousness = Love. It has no properties. At least, not when it is not pretending that it does.

One realizes the map isn't the territory, until realizing that the one realizing doesn't ultimately exist. The map is the territory, pointing to itself.

The ego takes life seriously, because it doesn't realize it only exists within the dream. ? Some spiritual teachers are so intensely focused on the teaching that they forget the implications of what they are trying to teach. If someone is truly awake, how can they deny the irony? As my man Tolle says: Don’t trust a guru that never laughs.

@Terell Kirby ? @Nahm So true. I was meditating this morning, and started to laugh. It caught me by surprise, because usually it is just a deep sense of peace and freedom. Maybe laughter is the ultimate liberation

As I see it, spirituality is the path to lucid dreaming. Waking up to your ultimate nature, within the dream, is the purpose of life. As Aldous Huxley put it: 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

It feels like the end of suffering, effortless creativity, and the realization of unconditional love. I see enlightenment as a journey, where these states of Conscious clarity last longer, until you are in a perpetual state of presence. You realize your ultimate nature as Consciousness, that individuality is an illusion, and that attachments within the dream are distractions from the infinite abundance that you already are.

Ultimately, do you believe there is a distinction? Do boundaries exist, or are they only apparent as such? Is Consciousness all there is? If so, what is there to be aware of, other than itself?

Who is being aware of Consciousness? Ultimately, there is no separate "who", only Consciousness being Self-aware.

If time is relative, then there can be no absolute past or future, only the subjective perception of it. What happened to the "past" for the atomic clocks that showed an earlier time than the clocks left on the ground? If time is bound by perspective, what does that tell you about its ultimate reality? I accept that there is change, but only within relative reality. Space, time, and change are bound to the dream that Consciousness creates. They are only apparently, but not absolutely, real. Lord of the gods, you are the abode of the universe. Changeless, you are what is and what is not, and beyond the duality of existence and nonexistence. You are the first among the gods, the timeless spirit, the resting place of all beings. You are the knower and the thing which is known. You are the final home; with your infinite form you pervade the cosmos. - Bhagavad Gita 11:37-38 What does it mean to be the abode of the universe? Ultimate reality is beyond the cosmos, which it creates, but which does not define it. When individual perspectives dissolve, the appearance of the cosmos dissolves with them.

We are what we value. The worth of anything is entirely subjective. As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What happens when it is realized that there is no separate beholder? This realization is equanimity, or the letting go of value as ultimate reality. Attachments to money, popularity, etc. define the path that we follow. It is only when desires are seen clearly, as products of the conditioned mind, that the illusion of individual identity is dispelled. As Jesus put it: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! - Matthew 6:19-23

When people say there is only the present moment, they are pointing to a deeper reality, beyond personal experience. Consciousness creates the apparent dimensions of time and space, and everything within its cosmic web is only relatively real. This is directly realized, but has also been supported by science. If time was absolute, it would pass at the same rate, regardless of the perspective of the observer. However, once you move beyond the narrow band of normal human existence, the illusion of objective reality begins to fray. My favorite example is the Hafele–Keating experiment: In October 1971, Joseph C. Hafele, a physicist, and Richard E. Keating, an astronomer, took four cesium-beam atomic clocks aboard commercial airliners. They flew twice around the world, first eastward, then westward, and compared the clocks against others that remained at the United States Naval Observatory. When reunited, the three sets of clocks were found to disagree with one another, and their differences were consistent with the predictions of special and general relativity.

Ultimately, there is no location of the mind because space doesn't exist. Location is a meaningless concept, as is the idea of "my" mind and "my" body. From the relative perspective, in Eastern spirituality there is a form hierarchy for each being: The senses are higher than the body, the mind higher than the senses, above the mind is the intellect, and above the intellect is the Atman. Thus, knowing that which is supreme, let the Atman rule the ego. - Bhagavad Gita 3:42-43

Ultimatists will point out that there is no you to find the truth, only Consciousness, which is itself truth. Relativists will say that after realizing your true nature, you will be free to live lucidly, creatively, and serenely within the dream, until your form dissolves, and you dissolve like salt into the infinite ocean of You. Both are correct, based on perspective. There is no perspective, for ultimatists, and there are infinite perspectives, for relativists. The Mystery of God is beyond, and still encompasses both. Mystics have attempted to describe this (as transcendent vs. immanent divinity) for millennia, but words fail, and truth can only be directly realized.