Mal

@Corte LOL

@carlo I think it's safe to say that self inquiry is a skill that you can learn to do yourself, soon enough. I can't imagine Ramana Maharshi was constantly plugged into YouTube while on his way to Advita heaven...can you? Try expand contract, see if it works for you. To be honest of it's a decent meditation practice it will work. I still recommend "do nothing" because you can continue to practice anywhere you like, even while on the can! Warmly Mal

@Elton I'm merely telling you how orange is structured. Being able to put ideas into their proper context is an important skill to master -but that won't come online for you cognitively until you climb out of blue. Yep, this is true FOR ME. But at this point you're just parroting a belief that you picked up. Mal

@Neill Hi Neill, This seems a very fruitful endeavour. For those of us unavailable at certain times I'd like to suggest a recording of the chat and getting it up on here or YouTube. I'm just thinking that this would actually make the content and insights more widely available and provides us an opportunity to add retrospective comments later on. Do let me know your thoughts. Warm Regards Mal

Elton, If we were to attempt to boil down orange to its essence, it would be this: Orange is "thinking about thinking" Operations on operations. So what orange does naturally is he's a critic. A skeptic. Nobody's fool. An individual and his own man. He knows instinctively the wheat from the chaff and he looks very carefully at whos right and whos a charlatan. This is what you're already doing, the next step is to start to deconstruct Leo's work and really scrutinized it for flaws. Orange wants consistency and truth. Visual is correct.

I like it! Not a problem... We can always "ask teal" for a forecast...

Charlie. I just want to let you know how much I appreciate your presence here. Your instruction to just sit and become one with the life force is the best teaching I've had on this "path". I cannot fathom some of your experiences, but I have a personal policy that nothing is nonsense and that nothing need be ruled out. Your life is your life and others may not understand it, I don't, but this is not a reflection of you, but them. Thanks again Mal

To the 136th dimension....

Beautifully explained. Yes and yes. Enlightenment is not about getting rid of any of these things. It's all about changing our relationship to it. That's the beauty of this path, that the happiness we seek has always been the case. Nirvana is samsara, they are one. Mal

@Elton Elton, think about the following for a moment, Not as a philosophy but just contemplate this: Next time you decide to do something, anything, like speak, get up and walk around, anything, consider that before "you" made the decision to do any of these things your body already decided a split second before you had the thought. Neuroscience has confirmed this is the case. So no need to look for scientific evidence of enlightenment. What's left to ponder? Who is this "me" that thinks it's making all these choices? Think about this for a while.

@Elton Hi Elton, You are already seeing the limitations of your current worldview. This is good. Orange is watching. Forget about what you think orange might do for now. Instead concentrate on the practing the attitude of radical inclisivity - aka every person and stage holds a piece of the truth. This kind of open-mindedness will help you break down your current structure and open you up to new flavours, or colours, of existence and perspective that you do not yet have access to. See Ayala's post on resonance. Continue with self inquiry and meditation. But cognitive development rests on the ability to take mulit-faceted perspectives and see the world through many different lenses. Mal

There is no comparison. The intense joy is not felt all the time - it would be too much. The intensity of joy is felt in moments. The area around the heart feels like it's going to cave in at the sheer beauty of everything coupled with a bitter-sweet sense of regret that you dont always see everything as the divine.

You haven't got it in you. I'm sorry but there's no point you wasting your time or ours.

@abrakamowse You're not going to make it my friend. I'll tell you that now. No hard feelings. Mal

@abrakamowse I would start listening to charlie, because you are seriously misguided. Unless it is your purpose to sit and ruminate all day about something that is an illusion? Which is what most seekers actually do and where they end up. Just read his posts, they are illuminating. Use your mind for what it was made for, solving problems, not trying to grasp reality.

@abrakamowse Yes. Zen makes you work for it like a bitch. Just stop attending to the mind and start attending to the life energy that is animating this body. There are so many posts on this forum day in day out giving you the pointers, but none of you listen.

Your answer "should" be ...AAAAAHHHHHAAAAA!!!! YES, OF COURSE! Nothing else. You need to have an experience of it. Nobody can tell you what it is. And no, it doesn't require anything except a few moments of becoming one with the source of life sustaining you. A quick shift from watering the plant of the mind to being enlightened. Its so easy that you mess it up.

Clueless

Now that we understand the transcendental is in fact just the mundane: what is lacking in this moment? We are already enlightened

Thanks again. Its all here your comment. Very elegantly put!

@Leo Gura Godwin's law strikes again...

There are a ton of approaches to the path of enlightenment and self development. I happen to like the approach that includes "tiers". 1st tier is normal everyday existence. 2nd tier is a different ballpark. 2nd tier is what Maslow calls being cognition stage. There is more room in the self concept for transcendental experiences. This is not full enlightenment, but post-awakening. It is the first developmental stage in history that understands that ALL of the stages of 1st tier hold a crucial piece of the truth of human development and the awakening of consciousness. 2nd tier does not make any of the people who reside at normal everyday consciousness "wrong", it just knows that normal everyday consciousness and morality is not an accurate representation of the whole picture. The reason Maslow called 1st tier deficiency based is because 1st tier worldviews compete with each other. Each stage or culture thinks it's worldview is the only worldview worth having. It's highly moralistic and creates divisions and dichotomies in reality where none actually exist. So the general feeling is one of incompleteness and certain egoic needs are created and must be catered for. In the transcendent nothing is "wrong". There are no dichotomies. 1st tier views are illusions, but paradoxically are much needed because the morality set by the highly developed social stages (orange and green - what our wester model is based on) protects all of us from the lower moral stages - the pre-conventional stages. Morals are needed in reality, but they are not what reality is made of. Morals are man made in order to keep social homeostasis. Reality is made of "suchness" - "One Taste", one reality. So hierarchy is real on the relative side of the street (human perspectives) while Oneness is also reality (Absolute truth). But absolute truth and relative truth are not two, they are one - IF one is enlightened. So all perspectives are true, but partially true. Even absolute truth is partially true, because not everybody lives there. So this is why Integral is the first stage that recognizes the need for a perspective of the absolute that must include other 1st tier perspectives their reality. You are correct, everything is one, but everybody is allowed to have their perspective.

Let's have another crack at this. You don't need morality to pick up a gun and finish a person who is threatening to murder your family. You don't need morality to stop yourself either. If a lion walks into your living room, you will do what you need to do to survive. In the transcendent, you know everything is as it should be, but if somebody points a gun at your head you are still going to stop them, your morality isn't going to get in the way of you acting. The very act of you acting to stop them is also what should be. Everything is as it is. Murderers murder people. We punish them. That is what is despite what our minds want. Forget about level one crimes for a moment and think about the effects of what your mind is doing. You can be functional without moralizing. Moralizing is for people who think they will cease to be without some kind of opinion. They ARE their opinion. Their opinion gives them a sense of self, because they do not know their true self. We are taught to "carve out this hole in the ocean" from day one of our lives. Language is innate, it is cultivated by learning from others in our environment. If all we know is what we have been taught, we don't think about evolving any further than the concept of our separate self. If all we think we are is an individual then we need morals to negotiate the politics of the individual selves. Individual selves are a story, and each time something happens to the individual, the individual updates their story. For example, imagine you were bullied at school. It caused you so much pain that you decided that you were never going to be a bully yourself. Notice you created a moral from that experience Igine how many morals and rules you create as the story of the individual you progresses through life. This is how the ego is made. Now, imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself in the transcendent. You immediately understand that this individual self concept was an illusion all along. You're not going to hold onto morals anymore because you see that they were stories that gave you a sense of identity. One of the reasons it's so hard to become enlightened is because of this story. The more rigid it is, the more it's going to pull us back into it's shape after a transcendent experience. Like a memory foam mattress, we slide back into our original shape automatically because the morals are so strong. This is why I advocate cognitive development into 2nd tier cognition. At turquoise all these morals are dissolved and it becomes much easier to have transcendent experiences and stay there because the self is so expanded rather than contracted. It doesn't care about morals, morals are nothing to do with life or reality. Turquoise self is actually tiring of abstract conceptualizing and judging, and leans more toward simple direct witnessing of experience in the present moment.

It's OK We need to have the experience of the transcendent to talk about it in any meaningful way. The ego cannot understand it. All the ego has is philosophical thinking and will never be able to grasp the nature of reality - until the person has an experience. Hang out on the forum, there are a few people here who can give you pointers on how to swiftly have an experience without doing much work.

@Ajax Spot on! As another metaphor let us consider the discipline of our young children at different stages of morality: A smack at pre-conventional stage is abuse because of the state of the caregiver. There are very little smacks at post-conventional progressive stages, however, there is understanding and conversation. A smack is an act of love at the transpersonal stages.