Preetom

But Mandy!! How can we move further when our starting point is an assumption like "if so and so...then.." Have you noticed that all our attempts and modeling of describing absolute/god is heavily tainted with the human lens? This has been going on from time immemorial. Anthropomorphic projection aka projecting human thought language over everything in reality. You literally cannot think or model outside your human knowledge graph. No one can. If you want a frog knowledge graph, Mandy would have to cease completely and David ''the enlightened master" Hammond would be sad ? Jokes aside, an apple doesn't say i am apple, eat me. God doesn't say i am god, worship me. World doesn't say i am world, improve or destroy me. So on and so forth.

Good boy needs patience for goodies ?

Indeed. To label thinking as a problem is yet another problematic thought. The wrong use of thinking is trying to define, exggerrate, diminish, change, explain the 'I' through thinking. It goes in vain due to a category error as 'i' is prior to thinking. You can ask thinking to solve a math problem. But asking thinking to explain yourself is like asking a cow to lay an egg.

That is a caricature of enlightenment by deluded wannabes. Nondual enlightenment is not an age regressed state of early childhood. It is all oneness for a 6 months old baby who is unable to distinguish anything and basically tripping perpetually on all over reality. The enlightenment nondual traditions talk about is not that. So relax. You won't and possibly can't get back to being that mindless flashball once again. You already outgrew it. Or maybe you can...if you delude yourself so hard ?

Awesome post. Thanks for sharing. And glad that you've managed to notice this post glimpse/awakening trap without having to build a convoluted spiritual ego 10 years down the line. This self referring thought/ego patterns are pernicious indeed. Adyashanti talks about how after every single glimpse, there is always a major chance of the ego coming back and corrupting that knowledge. Thats why there is a massive potential pitfall for psychedelics or any major spiritual glimpse. Many people fall in this trap of considering enlightenment as a thinking game. While before they had miserable, sabotaging thoughts; now they wanna have enlightening thoughts. Talk about rearranging furnitures on the deck. I am starting to see thought as a once ferocious tiger, now turned toothless. Refusing to believe a thought, we basically defang the tiger. It still bites from time to time, but there is no real significant consequence to it. ''I am miserable" and ''i am god" both thoughts are product of same delusion

Reading scriptures and also observing in my own life, I came to see this 4 steps hierarchy in dealing with desires in order to progress further spiritually. Note: in this context, by desire I mean the dissonance we feel when there is a contradiction between what is and what we desire in the moment. This dissonance inevitably lead to further discomfort, guilt, shame, hopelessness, more craving etc down the line whether we suppress or follow that desire. So here is the hierarchy. 1) This is the best condition. These are the small number of people who are naturally inquisitive and introverted due to their extremely good karma. It is their genes so to speak to have minimum desires 2) The next one down is the use of reason and intelligence to conquer desire. Yoga Vasishtha goes on and on about this. These are some of the people who has some varying desires but upon hearing from the sages and scriptures about the trap and pitfall of desire, they can slowly untangle theirs using their reason, seeing clearly the mechanism and trap of desire without indulging in them too much. 3) The next step down is indulgence in desires and getting corresponding emotional feedback. Here, desires are way too strong for reason and logic to root out. The seeker-victim-aspirant actually needs to indulge in desires many times, slowly get emotional feedback and being honest and finally being experientially convinced about the trap and limit of desires. 4) This is the worst kind of horse in the hierarchy. Here, desires are so out of hand that it knows no bound. The only way out of this is to indulge in desires for decades and lifetimes, suffer unimaginably just to get the necessary counter samskaras to finally wake up from the trap of desires.

From now on, ask anyone who claims to be god in this forum to fix this issue without all these gymnastics. It seems even teh god of gods Leo is unable to fix it ?

You tell me Mandy

Thanks for replying! This outlook is really disturbing, especially in the beginning. Stephen Wolinsky often says language is abstract representation of things that don't really exist. So the question is, is there really an actual human behind the word 'human'? Is there an actual thing called life behind the word 'life'? So on and so forth. It seems like a gigantic house of cards about to collapse from a single poke. "All pointers point to that which is not" Scary stuff

And unfortunately i couldn't give you any ?

If you mean absolute consciousness then there is no positive definition. There cannot be a positive definition because that would be a contradiction of terms. How can we define something which is prior to definition? But there is a negative definition of consciousness. Very simple and eye opening. "Anything you are aware of, is NOT Consciousness/Awareness"

Blasphemy! He is omniscient ?

Regarding this, I'll share few points you can check out 1) first of all, the ''ultimate consciousness" spitiuality talks about is not this mundane waking state consciousness or a dream state consciousness. That Ultimate Consciousness is neither inside nor outside the brain. 2) here is a logical point. You are saying you will go unconscious if you are hit in the head with a bat. How will you 'know' that? Do you see that in order to even claim unconsciousness, there has to be a knowing element present all throughout? 3) It may be the case is that brain channels consciousness. Just like a door acts as an entry point in a room which can channelize people to come in. Now would you say that the door is producing all the people coming in? Hell no! All hail the almighty door ? The bottom line is as Rupert Spira often points out, if we start any investigation with an assumption(like matter), all our discoveries and interpretations are gonna be colored by that limitation at every step. Instead if we start with the indubitable experience of ''i am aware or i exist'', our starting line ceases to be an assumption. So there is really 2 ways of investigating. The way of experience and the way of beliefs/assumptions.

Holy shit! I'll have to practice 10k hours to play this piece ?

@winterknight Hello hope you are doing well. I kinda touched on this a bit before but I'd be grateful if you could elaborate more on this topic. The topic is the concept of 'life' and 'consciousness'. Upon doing self inquiry, I inevitably reach a point where the concept of 'life' literally vanishes. 'Life' turns out to be an utter illusion. Thoughts, emotions, sensations, sights, sounds etc none has absolutely no life in them. This illusion of life only seems to persist in inadvertance. But when probbed and inquired, it is gone. My question is, is this what is meant by Maya or primal illusion/ignorance? Like exactly in a dream at night, all the people and surroundings seems to be so alive and interacting among them. But really they were, are or will never be 'alive'. Same case in waking state, the illusion of movement and change create this illusion of 'life'. But when inquired, 'life' is never found. This verily undermines our natural outlook of treating everything as alive. Maya caught us by the throat. Same deal with 'consciousness'. Upon inquiry, it is found that the ONLY aware element is 'I'. It is nowhere to be found, there is only a sense of existence and upon deep inquiry even that fades away as well. So dovetailing with the 'life' question, being a 'conscious' agent is another trick of Maya. Ultimately non-existence and yet dominating all throughout our lives. Now having all that said, I usually ignore all these perceptual discoveries and instead try to lock on the 'I' who notices these shifts in self-inquiry, as it should be done. So I'd like to hear your take on the concept of 'life' and 'consciousness' that you came across through your own discovery. Thanks.

You make cry.. All the best in your hero's journey

Anyway on a sidenote, if you still think one needs desires in order to have a soul or feel alive then you might wanna check again what you mean by the soul. ''I'll turn into a soulless robot without my desires, attachments and preferences'' ------> 99.9999% hold this view. It would be a shame if you too hold that view after all this self help, spirituality, contemplation and breakthroughs.

HOLY HELL THAT'S THE PINNACLE OF SELF ACCEPTANCE AND SELF LOVE

A world where less than 60 people hold more wealth than rest of the world population, creating heaven on earth is another cock and bull story. Cool story bro! As long as there is one selfish prick alive, the world will never be heaven. Whereas, we now got almost 8 billion. Only a deeply enlightened being can transcend his/her own selfishness. Now if the world was full of enlightened people, human race would eventually go extinct as they are not so hung up on survival and passing off their genes. So it turns out the world will either always remain a hell(A progressively well decorated hell, wink wink) or go extinct; never a heaven

Haha it is in the eye of beholder ? @possibilities Interesting perspective. Thanks

There was a thread about depersonalization few days ago that didnt have the good fortune to live long where a discussion was being initiated about 'purpose'. I thought about this more and decided to share here the barebones of it. What I noticed is that 'purpose' and ''subjective self awareness" are antithesis to each other, exactly like ego is the antithesis of God(I am not going into absolute relativism here where God=ego. If we talk like that, then we can literally say anything and the entire mode of communication breaks apart). So the bottomline is, if we notice carefully, that which has a hardwired purpose, doesn't have subjective self consciousness. The purpose of a video game character is to chase trophies in that game context, purpose of automatic car is to drive safely, purpose of computer is to crunch number. But notice that even though all these 'entities' are exhibiting remarkable feat of intelligent activities, no scientist or philosopher will ever claim that these entities are simultaneously having a private, subjective, self conscious life. This is known as the hard problem of consciousness. So we can see that exhibition of intelligence does not necessarily imply the presence of subjective self awareness. Now what about us? We are verily self conscious beings. If we were made for a rigid purpose by some 'god', then we wouldn't have self consciousness because that would be antithetical and inefficient towards the ''purpose project''. This is where things get interesting. My guess is, if science can ever 'create' a subjectively self consciousness being, that day science will simultaneously figure out God. Which is of course impossible because an objective operation like science is impotent in the subjective self conscious realm. Science is trying to make human like robots which acts and reacts like human, even the looks and facial emotional expressions are humane. But is such a robot having a self consciousness life? No. This again goes into the dangerous territory of solipcism where the only subjective reality is mine and that is all there is. I can infer that "other people" might also having subjective private life depending on their humane actions and reactions, but the fact of the matter is, its impossible to know. Now this again might open up entire can of worms if hardcore materialists retort and proclaim that subjectivity is an illusion due to its utter circularity and self-limitation and thus hard solid objectivity is all there is. Then that makes us verily robots; dead matter having an illusion of subjective life. So from this materialistic paradigm, all purpose, value, birth, death gets null and void and almighty matter remains. Now leaving that aside, from the consciousness paradigm, there is ONLY ONE purpose. And its a purpose of such a unique and radical nature that this purpose is already self-fulfilled and there is absolutely nothing outside this purpose. And that purpose is to simply Be. We human "beings"(ta da! Rings some bells?) are like miniatures of God who are fulfilling the only purpose of God, which is to just be. And as Rupert Spira says, through any and all experience, the one common thread is "I am aware". The rest called my life, my body, my things, my work etc are mere superimposition. Similarly the appearance of this entire universe is a superimposition on Gods purpose: Being. These superimpositions are seen as something real and distinct from being as long as the fact of the matter is not recognized and acknowledged. And by being i dont mean being this or that, but nondual being. I'll leave it at that, feel free to share your insights about the existential nature of purpose.

but that is the knowledge limitation! How can a scientist ever verify that his/her pet doll with brain goo has subjective self consciousness?? He/she can ONLY know their own subjective awareness. There is no proof/verification for self existence, subjective self awareness. There cannot be. This subjective self awareness goes way beyond any mode of knowledge or proof. Thats exactly why I said the day subjective awareness gets proven/created, that day scientists will prove God. And of course that will never happen ?

Amen

Note: By Enlightenment, I mean the irreversible real deal, not the states or levels that come and go. This might be a long post. Hope those dealing with confusion due to many contradictory statements and theories will find some clarity and get some ideas on what they can do to move forward. I am not gonna post a single thing based on speculation, things that are outside ones daily experience and things that cant survive logical scrutiny. Part 1: What Enlightenment is and how it happens. There is an ego/mind/I/subject perceiving everything else. This ego projects the entire field of experience and knows all the objects by paying attention. So attention is the power or mechanism through which ego projects and knows experiences both in waking and dream states. Now the nature of this ego is it can only sustain an experience as long as it is paying attention to it. Turn your back on the sun, there is no sun to see. Similarly, literally everything starting from thoughts to physical matter are objects for ego, projected by ego. They are there ONLY as long as ego is there to perceive them. Sounds like solipsism? Hell yeah it does. But notice whether one accepts or rejects solipsism, it is still done by the final gatekeeper which is the ego. Literally there is no object without this subject being present to perceive. Now Enlightenment tells that this entire mode of subject-object experience is an illusion and it only persists due to inadvertence or lack of scrutiny. And all of human suffering and problems are fundamentally a result of errors stemming from this illusion/ignorance. But there is a real substratum 'underneath' this illusion. Lets call it the Self. Now how to practically go about it? There is an unique feature of this subject or ego. It runs amok, solidifies itself and sustains this illusion ONLY as long as it is paying attention to things other than itself. But when this same attention is relaxed from objects and turned towards the subject, this subject starts to shrink and thus the illusion starts to break apart. The proof of it will be understood by those who ever did self inquiry in dreams. Whenever attention is directed toward the dream subject instead of on the dream objects, one either wakes up or sinks into deep sleep or in yoga nidra(conscious sleep). In other words, the dream state illusion cant survive for long. So focusing attention on the subject=Breaking free of the illusion. Self inquiry is just another name of this process. Lets have a look at that. Part 2: Self inquiry and the mechanism through which it works. (Note: very advanced pointers here. It might be in total contradiction to how that word is often thrown around) So basically for enlightenment, one simply needs to stop paying attention to all objects. Period. But what is there other than attention or conventional mode of experience? Interestingly, when one deliberately, progressively stops paying attention to objects, one lands on a very new mode called Being. The knowing consciousness gets replaced with being consciousness. This Being doesn't know any object of experience. It simply is awareness of being the subject itself. The usual confusion here is whether everything goes blank or one passes out. Neither of those. There are still sights, sounds etc but they are not known as phenomena. As no attention is paid to them, the entire idea of a world or objects collapses. There is no stream of attention going out and checking whether there is still a real world or not. All usual self inquiry methods and pointers like searching for the I, asking questions, trying to be the witness of thoughts, trying to disidentify etc are really the antithesis of what self inquiry at its core is. Those are all activities of the ego aka paying attention. They all must come to this tipping point where objective attention ceases and gets replaced with Being. Most of the time it happens by accident and thats why most people dont know what is really going on here. But if one conceptually understands that it is this Being cognition that is originally meant by self inquiry, now one knows what to 'do'(relaxing attention on ones own self) and what to avoid(paying attention to things). This is simply a skillful attention game one gets good at by repeated attempts. When one lands on Being, mind automatically gets silenced. There is no more effort to witness the thoughts, or trying to be in the present, or trying to be spiritual etc. This is the highest and final practice one can 'do' until Enlightenment happens. The subject simply being itself without attending to other objects. Now what is going on here during this Being session that leads to Enlightenment? Basically the ego is having satsang with the Self. This is the true meaning of Satsang. The satsang we watch on YouTube is a caricature and a pale reflection of the real deal. The true Satsang is Sanga(communion) with Sat(That which IS/Reality/Self). The Self is the real guru aka Sadhguru(not the guy with white beard ?) There is a nonverbal, direct, nondual transmission that goes on from the Self to the ego. And this transmission is really the ONLY way one ever gets enlightened whether one may know it or not. Whatever yoga, meditation, psychedelic one is doing, their only real purpose is to bypass all the bullshit and thoughts of the mind and come to this silent transmission. If one's spiritual practice is providing exactly that, then its a direct method. If not, it is something indirect. By attending to this satsang or being over a long period of time, the patterns and tendencies of ego keeps getting weaker and weaker simply due to not paying attention to them, as the attention is relaxed in sweet being and receiving nondual transmission from the Self. This is the culminating phase. At one point, when the egoic patterns are mostly erased through indifference, the ego/subject along with its projections(universe) literally gets devoured into the Self once and for all. This is the meaning of mind sinking into the Heart, Everything being reduced and sunk into Consciousness. This great assimilation is also known as the final surrender. Done. After the collapse of the subject, its projection called objects are devoured simultaneouly. So the subject-object mechanism collapses once and for all and only nondual Being of the Self remains as the substratum. So no ego ever gets Enlightened with its own activity. It is only the grace or power of the Self which facilitates enlightenment. Important note: This nondual transmission is NOT an experience one can know. So please dont search for it as if it was another object. Its like a mechanism running in the background, like updating an OS. Part 3: Where psychedelics may fall short. So we can see that Enlightenment can ONLY happen by attending to the non dual transmission from the Self, the real Satsang. Simply said, Being. It can NEVER happen by any activity of the ego-mind, that means thinking, concentrating on objects, insights, models, experiences, efforts done by the mind etc. So it turns out that if one wants to get Enlightened, it is all about being, being, being; until one literally 'forgets' how to know something as an object in a dualistic view. Its NOT about insights, understanding, trying to embody, learn, do something, getting flashy experiences, trying to be spiritual. Basically, Enlightenment can happen without the ego ever knowing or figuring out anything at all! Enlightenment can happen without ever bothering about god, universe, other people, karma, cosmology etc. It only happens through that silent transmission. Now my hunch is these are the 2 main setbacks of psychedelics. 1) Psychedelics are not sustainable over a long time. Yes it bypasses the delusions of ego and goes to the nondual transmission very quickly(given its a potent one like 5 meo). But alas the satsang is too short and repeated dosage hour after hour would fry one's system. 2) An even greater danger. After the psychedelic peak experience, the ego is back again. Fresh and rejuvenated, ready to get back on its JOB which is attending to objects with its voracious appetite! It cant help but going back and mistranslating that silent transmission in the name of insights, understanding, improvement, levels, figuring out reality, breakthroughs, living on the memory of becoming god, embodiment and whatnot; thinking that it will get enlightened by its own accumulated activities. Distortion upon distortion. Stuck in a twisted web of knowledge. Condemned to remain as this votalie complex between the real and the unreal. Note: The purpose of this post is not to fight with other paths and people. Just giving a general practical map of this highly confusing topic. If it sounds logically fair, take whatever helps. If not, may god help you If there is any question from anyone, I'll try to answer it.

Preach!