Preetom

@kevin124 Hello. I invite you to take a day off and ponder on this small retreat. 1) 2) 3)

Make a list of everything you take for granted everyday. Then turn it around and start being grateful about them instead of being entitled about them. Soon you’ll see your baseline happiness and appreciation of life shooting through the roofs. A good chat or a little gift from friends or family, a service or art you bought, good behaviors from strangers, decent weather, a dish, your health and ability to move etc...everything you take for granted or feel entitled about, thats the bankruptcy of happiness. On the other hand, gratitude is the currency of happiness. In the final analysis, life is absolutely a zero sum game; a dream which is not really happening in the first place. All of past, present and future is an eternally, non existentially appearance on Beingness. The way to happiness in this system is gratitude and leaving behind the habitual entitlement tendency.

bruh your name is literally ''someone here'' ''No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.''

@Someone here Now that you've seen stuff; read your posts from 6-12 months before in this forum. What would you tell/talk with that guy?

Sit casually and relax totally. Then for a moment imagine all your phenomenal experience has vanished in one swoop. All of it at once. You can visualize some things to make it happen more easily. Like imagining a fast truck which ran over you so fast that all phenomenal experience is gone in a flash. It was so fast and total that you didn't even feel any pain. Or a master samurai cutting you in half from behind so fast that its lights out. ITS LIGHTS OUT. TOTALLY. Right at that moment, you should 'feel' what you really are. The primordial I AM. Everything is gone. But you still are. Independent of any coming or going. That's what you are. That's what you've always been and that's what you'll always ever be. You'll also see that Being is all there is. Nothing more has ever happened other than Being. Nothing ever starts or ends. Being is all there is, complete in itself; no speculation or ideation attached to it. If you can't feel it, you can keep at it. Its not under your control to recognize what you are. Like the example Leo once gave, the donkey in front of the mirror has to recognize itself. And it can only happen by some unexplainable happy accident. All you can ever do is to keep being aware, keep looking

Thanks for sharing. I am talking about something very similar. These visualization/mental posture are helpful because its all about correcting an error made by mind: Wrong seeing. It sees what is not there in the first place and it fails to see what is the only thing ever present. It sees fragments and objects which are not there in the first place. But it misses the one essence of itself and everything it misinterprets/sees. This seeming mental delusion(!)/wrong seeing is corrected by mental poise/silence/renunciation(Of thought forms). Hope you and your son doing well. And then when the lights come back up, it is still the Void There was never anything apart from That

It seems that way when linguistically expressed. But the actual thing is not at all like this. There is no room for such ideation in that totality

Being the timeless, omnipotent, omniscient, body less god

If you feel you don't have 100s of hours to listen to other teachers deciphering the nature of Reality, start here with 8 minutes.

have fun

Valid point here. But you seem to be either willingly or not so willingly being unable to understand what Rupert is trying to convey. What you are repeatedly calling 'THIS'; Rupert calls it as 'Consciousness'. The experience of being Aware. The only experience there ever is, was or ever can be. Simply THIS. Consciousness. Whatever you wanna call it or not. When anyone argues for or against THIS; it still remains THIS. It is unfathomable. Even when it is attempted to grasp, it still remains THIS.

You mean someone has to explain it exactly how you want it on your terms. That being said I found Jed McKenna's comment on Buddhism ironic. ''Buddhism created a whole bunch of Bhuddists, not a single Buddha'' That escalated pretty quickly ?

LMAO ????

Why do you even post contents of other authors here? This place already got its curriculum. So you have to talk the talk, dance with the groove, follow the curriculum here in oder to have it accepted/validated. It doesn't matter who you are or what you've realized or not; but you gotta talk the talk of this place. Thats the name of the game pal

An arena where enlightened masters can lock their horns and settle scores is a well deserved demand by now. Cmon Leo tf are you doing?

@VeganAwake Thanks, I'll check out Newman's video. You can call it whatever you want: god, love, peace, consciousness, self, nothing or even refuse to name/define it. They all seem/sound true from certain views, but the definition is always redundant. And arguing about the awakening game; who is more woke, who passed which stage is no different than wall street corporate ladder chimpery. Your profile pic sums it well haha. NOTHING MATTERS

Whatever object, sensation, feeling, intuition, thought, idea, doubt, insight etc arise; Am I aware of this or is this aware of I? What is this I that is aware, the only aware element there is?

You're doing well. Keep going and one day you'll start laughing at your own self created jokes more often. Jokes like ''I've had many experiences. I am going somewhere. Something clouds me. I forget the good stuff. Its hard. I can't remember myself in practical terms''. May the force be with you peanut

You might wanna check him out. Also his books The nature of Consciousness or Presence Vol 1,2; If you want a systematic study and conceptual understanding instead of a scrambled, more confusing, contradictory hodgepodge theory in this field.

Unless one completely understands and sees that there is no direction to redirect effort; one has to deliberately, consciously put in the effort to ignore everything in perception and hunt for the observer. The next steps will reveal themselves naturally. What happens is, through this intense effort and focused attention towards the pursuit of the observer; the notion of 'I' reforms...sort of like a software update in the back. You don't worry about it at all. It will happen by itself and run its course while you're hunting for yourself with a focused attention. The self gets more and more detached; until at one point the notion of effort falls away. One intuites that the honey is not gained by even the slightest effort towards any direction outside; but through gently falling into oneself. No words can describe this being unless one tastes it first hand. From there, it is the final stage of self inquiry. No longer effort or massive fireworks. Life becomes equanimous and only a sweet, gentle remembrance of oneself as Consciousness remains..until the last subtle vestiges of selfhood evaporates and one is completely done. The donkey example Leo once gave sort of maps out this process really well. Suppose a donkey is taken in front of a mirror and told that the reflection is it's own face. But the donkey is incapable of understanding or intuiting that the reflection is its own. The self inquiry process begins. The donkey wracks its brain for days trying to figure out how this reflection is his own. He gets angry, turmoiled. He goes through all the emotional fireworks; all his donkey karma if he is able to stick to the routine of looking himself in the mirror and trying. Slowly he calms down over time. The donkey slowly wises up. Something in him intuits that the secret of his true identity lies somehow in this mirror reflection. He understands that he can decipher this secret only by looking at the mirror directly; not by doing more donkey stuff or becoming a better donkey or being the greatest donkey ever lived or being the donkey king with a big harem etc. Thus the donkey sits in front of the mirror. He sits; steadily looking into the mirror; calm and poised; days go by; seasons go by; there is no more agitation or fireworks left; the donkey story becomes a faded memory by then. He keeps sitting and looking...until one day he finally gets it ''OHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! That's me! Of course!''. That moment is a happy accident. The Self/Awareness wakes up to itself as its real nature; undistorted by intermediaries.

This instruction written by David Godman about the technique of self inquiry is as clean as it can be. Let me share some points that indicate that one is doing it right from own experience. Sorted in a kind of chronological fashion. 1) The first stage is to hunt for the subject/perceiver/awarer of all experience/perception. This stage is the most brutal where one has to go the through the surface and mid layers of psyco-physical garbage or conditioning accumulated since birth. One cannot rest on any object until he finds the perceiver of that object. It is the most effortful stage. Very strong emotional reactions, wanting to quit this 'stupid' technique etc is to be expected as self inquiry is literally a process of self-mutilation and ego is shooting itself in the foot. Love, bliss, heart crap will run out of the window 2) If one can persevere through, the first few awakenings happen by accident (usually in a retreat like setting where one is practicing for 12 hours a day. Might happen on 3rd/4th/5th.. day). In that moment, one experiences what nirvana is; the complete cessation of suffering. 3) Then one goes back and forth, kinda dabble with the technique for a while. One has glimpsed heaven but now it feels like a fading memory. Some people might slowly forget about all this spirituality and get busy again with materialistic life after a while. Some might get more deluded thinking they are better than everyone else. 4) Only a few lucky ones keep up that intention of God/knowing the Self/Truth pure. They keep on probing within them slowly but steadily. The flashy days are gone. There is rarely any deep emotional or mental reactions or confusions as one regularly starts getting glimpses here and there; they voluntarily strip themselves of everything in perception. One abides more and more in that heart of being. 5) All thoughts, ideas, knowledge slowly get deconstructed. They lose their teeth. They can't bite anymore or dictate how reality is or should be anymore. The ideas of time, birth/death, suffering, humanity, worry, anxiety, philosophy, seriousness, even enlightenment or ideas about god/being/self ideas/progress/regress still look the same; but they don't have teeth anymore. 6) At this stage one might come to several unique, indescribable experiences. One knows, sees, feels oneself as unattached, unattached, unattached, undefinable. One feels so HUGE...while all of the world in front seems like a thin layer of bubbles ; a superficial surface over oneself. One feels oneself as never being born. The biological birth story is a fading memory at this point. At best one feels born afresh instantly only when a self referencial thought arises. One might occasionally get overwhelmed with a sort of brain dead, intoxicating happiness for absolutely no reason whatsoever. At this point one finally understand why no other action, knowledge, accumulation of any form or thing can ever yield Truth except pure Being. 7) Even all this is seen as they are, capricious non existent bubbles. A steady, poised being attention firms more and more. One forgets everything, one gets erased without any resistance or suffering cause he knows this is the natural course of events. 8) When all other is gone, self is gone as well. What remains is that which cannot be talked about. One is done. Even the idea of being done or something remaining is done. huh what a sweet joke

The Self is the only real Sadhguru there is. The rest are bunch of clowns and gimmicks compared to THAT. Hold yourself firmly.

BTW thats the superficial answer. The truth of the matter is there is only one real guru; having the 100% success rate. Its the Self. Your own Self; the only Self there is. Its lineage is Self Love aka also known as Grace. Leave everything and cling to that guru. When HE is pleased, HE consumes the entirety of existence; leaving you in nirvana/extinction. "The I casts off the illusion of I and yet remains I. Such is the paradox of Realization. But the realized one finds no contradiction in it"

Definitely the direct path teachers like Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj and Atmananda Krishnamenon; the triple gem who revitalized the original primal spirituality and separated it from the age long tyranny of dogmatic religion. There is no modern day spirituality without the foundation they left behind(+ some enlightened zen masters). What they left behind is a miracle technology like the invention of electricity or internet which rendered going back into the dark ages or reverting back to stage blue(as the pinaccle of spirituality and well being) as impossible forever. That being said, there is no such thing as an enlightened guru or students. There is either only enlightenment or a bunch of deluded gurus and students.

Yes and no