Wilhelm44

@Breakingthewall I am curious, how exactly is your notion of Unlimited Being, different from, the Indescribable Mystery (or the Beloved), so called Nothingness (not the opposite of somethingness, but I admit potentially a misleading term), that has the infinite ability to appear as anything under the sun and beyond, and which has as its nature, unconditional freedom, unconditional love, unconditional aliveness, infinite beauty etc ?

Aha, thank you. I would also just like to get some clarity on one other thing if you don't mind, A while back in the Jim Newman thread you said: "to answer the question just in case the objective wasn’t clear ..it’s the absolute self . If you were to tell Jim Newman there is such a thing as an absolute self he would deny it and say that there is no self at all. Those non duality speakers who say there is no self at all have a huge misunderstanding of certain teachings of Buddhism (essentially they are in love with the Buddhist teaching about no self and just parrot it mindlessly.. there is no separate self inside the human body . That’s true . But they miss the absolute self which could be said to be the ground of being . It’s there even in Deep sleep ..prior to birth ..and after the death of the body . And it’s unborn and deathless . That’s how you can remember that you were nothing before birth and you can remember there was nothing in deep sleep..because the absolute self was there in those states . It doesn’t die or sleep . It’s pure eternal awareness." I am curious, how exactly is your notion of Absolute Self, different from, the Indescribable Mystery (or the Beloved), so called Nothingness (not the opposite of somethingness, but I admit potentially a misleading term), that has the infinite ability to appear as anything under the sun and beyond, and which has as its nature, unconditional freedom, unconditional love, unconditional aliveness, infinite beauty etc ?

But if your sense of separate self is an illusion, does the same not apply to everyone else, or am I missing something ?

How so ?

What if you are actually also an empty shell, and there's actually no one here.

Beautiful.

After some contemplation, I realized that I can't deny the validity of my own experience, where I do seem to be experiencing a rapid unravelling of the separate sense of self, memories don't have a sense of me anymore, and the 'realness' of others seems to be fading also. Simultaneously I'm not expecting you to deny the validity of your experience. Thus we probably won't be able to convince each other here. I would however be curious to know what you think Adyashanti, and many other spiritual teachers through the ages, including our very own Leo here, meant, when they said: "Nothing has ever actually happened." ? Another thing that's often heard is, "it's actually all a big joke" or "the snake was seen to be just a rope" (I know you like to say: Okay, but what if you guys don't have any money, or if someone has a gun to your head, lets see if you still think it's an illusion then. This is a bit of a silly argument in my opinion. The relative comfort or intensity of appearances doesn't really say anything per say about the deeper nature of reality. ) Some quotes from science: Niels Bohr "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." Albert Einstein "For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." John Archibald Wheeler "We are not only spectators, but we are actors in the great drama of existence." Werner Heisenberg "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." Erwin Schrödinger "The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down... for this barrier does not exist." (And once again: none of this implies a dismissal or any sense of disrespect towards what is apparently happening.) Illusion implies 'something' beyond the duality of unreal or real. Ultimately words can't really describe what This is. (If material objects were ultimately real, would we not find complete and lasting fullfillment in their consumption)

I'm going to feel into that and contemplate, thank you.

Beautiful, thank you

Please can you say something about how your daily experience of life has changed since the sense of separate self 'fell away' ? Like practical functioning , social interactions etc ?

Wow, thanks !

Bingo

I'm not denying the intelligence of evolution or the marvels of the brain. What I am saying is that every day now it's becoming more obvious to me that it's an illusion that there's an actual entity in there called Wilhelm who's somehow the controller.

Yeah, it's interesting to note that a little over a hundred years ago, quantum physics wasn't even a thing. Would be fascinating to see what science will be saying about reality another hundred years from now. Maybe some pattern interrupts on the way.

I mostly only follow soccer during the world cup, but from these clips it seems that perhaps Messi in his prime was even better than Maradona in some ways.

Beautiful

Just discovered this guy recently, and every time I listen to him, more and more of the sense of separate self just seems to melt away without any effort. Kinda magical really. It's gotten to the point now that when I think of memories of the past, there are impressions of past events, but I can't find a me in those memories, quite trippy.

I was just thinking, it would be a bit strange if reality worked such, that you were only allowed access to God, if you took psychedelics. God is powerful enough to 'return' itself to itself, through the Grace of God itself.

🙂

Amen

Thank you. You don't think that science might be slightly off when it comes to the deeper mysteries of reality ?

How dare you

Doesn't everything that's appearing seem kind of immediate to you, like magic. Perhaps the linear backstory of how we got here is the illusion. What appears can disappear.