WelcometoReality

After awakening the ego will still be there in thought and feeling since that is what it's made of and it will try to bring back control with thought, anxiety, fear and it will try to reconstruct as an enlightened person or god. After awakening there is still work to disentangle the ego identification which is integrated in the thought feeling patterns until the ego completely dissolves. The body will still operate without an ego trying to control. It will be no effort because the ego is the resistance itself.

How did that manifest in your life? What is giving you direction in your life right now?

It depends on what you want to point to with the word energy. In your own experience it might be feelings or mood. In a more theoretic context it might be electricity.

@BipolarGrowth I resonated with what he said about ego dies and is reborn from moment to moment in form of thoughts and feelings. And if those are believed to be true ego is running our life.

It's only painful if we resist it which most of us do. ?

@roopepa if you don't want to know truth then it might be better to do something else with your time. At a certain point you can't go back and undo this work. Find out what you really want and focus on that instead.

@SageModeAustin Do you do any kournaling about this stuff? It might help you create some distance to it.

There is no object without a thought. It creates objects from "parts" of seeing. Without thought it's just one "field" of awareness.

@GreenWoods If the screenshots are moving fast enough there doesn't seem to be screenshots but a movie. What if the screenshots in this case are thought moving so quickly that it seems to be an object in motion?

If you fell back into samsara it wouldnt be fully enlightenment. It's the final liberation where there no longer is any identification left with that which can fall back. Yet it's going back into Samsara without believing that it's true. "To be of in the world but not of it."

See through the questioner/self/thought.

Yes. Seeking something other than truth/knowing. Which is perfectly fine.

@machiavelli What is is and thought puts the labels good and bad on parts of it which causes separation. Grasping the good and pushing away the bad. Liberation is seeing through the illusion that the thoughts create.

@Beginner Mind It's so simple that it might seem boring to the spirtual seeker.

Yes this is it. Yes. Surrender those thoughts The belief that it's hard makes it hard. Everything you said are pointers. There is no reality to it. There is nowhere to rest your head.

Confusion comes from thought trying to makes sense of this. There is nothing it can do.

Mistakes are thought that you should have than something other than what you did so that the present could be something other than it is. Believing such thought causes contractions in the body which might be interpreted by thought as "feeling bad".

The earth seems very flat from where I'm standing right now, assuming that the belief that I'm standing on planet earth right now is true. It might seem round to an astronaut in outer space. Assuming that what he sees is planet earth. Which of those perspectives are true?

Yes, that's true. We might want for example a pizza so we eat one and then we feel happy. Most people think it's the pizza that made us happy but it's because we no longer want anything in that moment. We are for a short while satisfied so then we are happy. Like @VeganAwake said. @Someone here What if we the next day want another pizza? And the next day.. and the next day.. What if the key to happiness is meeting the uncomfortability of the unfulfilled desire.

Pleasure and happiness. Is there a difference between the two?

@Phyllis Wagner Even if the mathematical model is a 100% correct model of how reality is behaving it's still just a model that is within reality. Remove reality and there is no model. Remove model and reality still exists.

Yes we are conditioned to move towards pleasures such as sex, food etc. Can we transcend those? Maybe we can or maybe not. What we can do is see through the misery and struggle we create. Is the glass half empty or half full? Seeing it as half empty certainly won't bring more happiness into your life will it?

Consciousness was still aware even though there was nothing to be aware of. Just a recognition of a presence nothing else.

When Rupert had the anaesthisia the mind stopped being aware but consciousness was still there. Nothing influences it on that level. Time happens within consciousness.