Preetom

@Aaron p Some sources of suffering/dissonance in the path for those who are seriously progressing 1) being a lone wolf. Not resonating with any relationship for a while 2) death of all preferrances and motivation for a while as the entire motivation system would eventually have to die and get reborn anew 3) popping of most fantasies, wants and certainties of the past like bubbles. 4) having moderate to heavy disorientation in self image as the elements get popped piece by piece..leaving a pale shadow of one's previous, precious self. Not recognizing oneself that much. Being alien to oneself. 5) a great uncertainty about future. A irksome fear of not finding any solid ground ever again! 6) just feeling meh from time to time. The existential meh. For no aparrent reason. Especially after waking up from sleep.

Yes, Rupert Spira talks about this as well. "As a man is, so he sees" When we used to condition ourselves as a body-mind, all our thoughts, actions and worldviews were colored by that distorted lens. Its not that we were actively having selfish thoughts. Rather, all those were a natural byproduct of how we knew ourselves. Same deal with self realization. When we remain as the Self, reality will naturally correspond in alignment to that. Its not an entity that actively 'tries' to outdo itself, embody things alien to itself and spread new vegan propagandas. Thats like putting the cart before the horse ?

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