Telepresent

Great: and I meant what I asked. Apologies if I sounded argumentative, I really didn't mean to. It sounds, from what you've said, like you've reached an awareness I haven't. I'm being genuine when I ask if you have any advice?

And this is the critical thing, that so many people don't recognise. So they end up singing from someone else's songsheet, and wondering what went wrong

Yes, and I'm starting to hit touches of what I suspect might be that remebrance. The problem I have is of language: you talk of "I", or "you", and that gets interpreted by my thoughts as the mental pattern which my thoughts think I am. I sometimes think this is the problem that spiritual teachers have: they seem to forget that the "I" to which they refer is not the same "I" that interprets/imagines the message

HA! This is a hugely important point, though. Exactly why are we ascribing to this idea that enlightenment, or whatever, is the ultimate truth, and what we should be piloting towards? I mean, really, why? A lot of people have been doing this so long it's default and they don't remember why. What's your reason? Mine is that it struck an inner chord that said "yes, this is true, keep investigating", and I haven't satisfied that chord yet.

Congratulations! I echo your encouragement to others to stick with it! You describe that 'for some reason' you're way more chill: I'd suggest trying to pull back meditative consciousness in though high-stress situations (maybe take a deep breath through the nose) - you might be surprised at the depth of self-realisation you're playing with on a subconscious level!

Thank you for this reply. As someone who is still 'pursuing', but who is aware of my pattern-making mind, what advice would you recommend as my next exploration? Cheers!

Adyashanti talks about how he still experiences ego reactions, they just get recognised for what they are very quickly. Jed McKenna talks about how he still has to 'wear' his old ego in order to funtion as a person. It appears as thought the enlightened state - if it exists - is far more alien than most people want to believe/imagine

And yet I am not. Because the I that reads these words and interprets them as I is not the I that you are talking to. Madness

I have no idea! I'm only taking it on others' words that there is a bedrock, and as I'm not accepting anyone else says without checking it for myself... I'm either going to reach a point where I satisfy myself that, despite all my efforts, I cannot go further (and in that satisfaction, I will have to reconcile myself to the possibility that I might be wrong); or I'm going to keep digging forever. Neither seems like a worse pursuit that living the consciousness I lived five years ago, though, so I'm going to keep going and maybe I'll remember to post a reply on my deathbed

I am as well. Absolutely. I'm just questioning the perspective we take on evolution. Of course, personal evolution is a whole other thing, which I guess is where you're coming from? If so, apologies for my earlier tangent. So, tell me (and again, please take this as one amateur to another, I don't want to come over as arrogant): what do you think enlightenment means?

I sometimes wonder whether this whole 'spirituality' game is the biggest practical joke ever pulled

For the most part, I'd say yes. All I see is people wanting to answer questions, and when they question those questions they want a slightly deeper answer they find more comfortable. 99% of traffic on this forum is people wanting comfort, not truth. That's where the myths come from. An answer that is good enough, comfortable enough. And that's what most people are asking for. You question @Prabhaker's answer. Good. Never take anything he/she says, or that I say, or that Leo says, or that anyone else says, as true. Because anything that we ever say to you can only be interpreted in your mind as a concept, an idea. For all I know @Prabhaker is enlightened. For all I know @Prabhaker is full of shit. I don't know. But I can take on those words and investigate them per my experience. If I can go back to your original question, there is a lot of need to KNOW in there. I would suggest (from one amateur to another) that you investigate that need to know. What is enlightenment to YOU? What does it mean? What are you imagining, expecting, remembering maybe? We can't answer for you. Hell, I don't even know that you exist. You don't know that I exist. So why trust me?

It's not suppressed by law enforcement. It's suppressed be believeing in law enforcement. Which is not to say that law enforcement is wrong, it's just that law is interpreted by everyone (and law always is an interpretation, not a fact, and any good judge would agree with that statement), and in the position of enforcement it's often better to err on the harder side. Ultimately if you disagree with the law you can disobey it. There may be consequences, but they don't stop you from acting in the first instance. But from the individual side, it's often better to err on the side of bending rules, and treating them as guidelines rather than sharp edges. It's really the importance of rules that you need to investigate. You mention ancestors having fought for it, which is true, but often that argument gets used as a barrier when it comes to opening a new gate in freedoms ("our ancestors didn't fight for this country to be flooded with immigrants taking our jobs", for example). The same is true of bosses, parents, police, governments. Once again I'm not saying "break the law" or "ignore your partents", but be sure to investigate the importance of what they insist on in their lives, in your life, and in your current reality (particularly in this economic climate). We often spend so much time wrapped up in rules we don't look up to breathe. Look up

Poking fun is always good I can be a mean git on hear as I'm really only concerned with the GRAND QUEST (... or something like that) and so always assume all questions are coming from that point of view! I wouldn't be surprised if the cavemen DID spend all their time mentally masturbating, though: all those old religions and myths came from somewhere

I'd say yes and no to that. The reason dictatorships censor books, television, films, internet, and other media is precisely because it is what they say. The dissemination is extremely dangerous to status quo, and language in particular can be hugely damaging. One of the most prescient things about 1984 (and if you haven't read it, do!) is that The Party understand that thought is based in language, and that by restricting language, you can restrict potential concepts. Once you have a generation who don't know the word or meaning of 'opposition', how can there be an opposition? So I'd say it is absolutely what you say - provided that you understand that what you say is a symbol, and not the thing itself. But of course, it comes down to what you do. Whether physically or mentally. And that's often where the greatest censorship comes in. You say "sometimes authority says no". Most of the time in my life, that authority is actually a voice in my head. An idea that I picked up from my parents or teachers that means 'I must not disobey or I will be punished' which prevents me from going through a red light at three in the morning which is clearly stuck on red (hasn't changed for 15 minutes) and there is no other traffic around. But I still don't move because that would be 'bad' or 'wrong'. Authority lives in the mind before it lives in the world, and only so much as we recognise it. Beyond that, it's just 'the way things are'.

Ok, but you're now talking about evolution as though its a wider social/ecological instinct. You're talking as though there's some over-arching arbiter who keeps things 'in balance'. Look: we talk about the end of human life as if it's the end of the world. It's not. Something will survive, life will continue to go on and survive. Evolution has primed the mind to care about itself, and pretty much only itself (with a little expansion to your local tribe), not to give a shit about ecology, environment, and the rest of the world. Those conscious aspects to which we ascribe (conservation, charity, support, etc.) only form a tiny part of mind, and often one that is overwhelmed when it comes to self-interest (see every wind-farm that has been challenged by locals protesting that their back yard will lose value). And, (and please bear in mind these are questions that I'm playing with just as much as I write them, not challenges to suggest you are 'wrong'), why shouldn't the 'greater awareness of the universe' be interested to see what happens when we kill off this lot of organisms and start with a new batch? The dinosaurs were cool, but let's kill them off and see how these mammal things do. Maybe it's time to let these mammal things kill themselves off, and see how the amphibians manage? Why should our very mammallian perspective be treated as 'right'? We kill trillions of bacteria every day. Is that considered genocide? Why not? Doesn't the universe care about the evolution of bacteria? Maybe it's getting us out the way so they can thrive!

There's a deeper question in here: what is authority? Who is an authority? Why are they an authority? As someone who has spent most of their life treating everyone around them as an authority (to the expense of my own expertise and adulthood), this element is the biggest impediment to the feeling of freedom of speech I have encountered: just the simple feeling of not being good enough. They know better. They're smarter. They're more important. What do I know?

Ok, but why would mind want/need to do that? The whole purpose of mind is to preserve the organism to which it serves. Remember that mind is itself not an entity: it is the result of the programmed processes that the brain (part of the organism) goes through on a stimulus/reaction basis. So why would that mind want/need to operate as an aspect of all the exists? It doesn't benifit the mind or the greater organism

No idea. How does knowing help you? (P.S. I don't want to be rude: I just see a lot of these kind of questions and wonder whether people want to dig to the truth, or want to build an idea of enlightenment in their head. Any answer to the caveman question is an idea. I.e. worthless if you want to reach the truth)

Cool. From what to what?

Why? I'm not challenging, but genuinely asking: what makes mind a disease? Why? What is wrong with ego?

Just to knock this on its head (I'm not coming from a place of 'having answers', but of always questioning questions) - why should enlightenment have any purpose? You're writing from a perspective of enlightenment having a 'point'. What if it doesn't? What if it's just a potential thing, as much or as valid as any other potential thing? Your first question is permeated with a sense that questions need answers. That because we have questions, there ARE answers. A while back, I was listening to McKenna's Damndest audiobook, and I suddently realised something: he describes enlightenment as "the end of knowing". And we can easily take this to mean "the ultimate knowledge". But it can also mean "no knowledge". Approaching questions and the need for answers with the possibility of "no knowledge" in mind can take you to an interesting place: not of ignorance, but of eating through concept-models. As for the big question of "what is enlightenment?", if you are still asking that question and have ANY concept of what it is, that concept is wrong. It is wrong because it is a concept. I have no idea what it is, but I know that every imagining of what it is as been wrong, and is wrong because the imagining lives within the imagination. It's why I get buggy on these forums: I see too many people trading ideas on what enlightenment is, or what this means or that means, and not enough people calling out their own bullshit. The only thing I can suggest, really, is to Dig Dig Dig. Disregard what anyone says, including Leo, me, Mooji, Tolle, McKenna, Adyashanti, Spira or whoever the hell else, and do the maths yourself.

I'm wary to write this because I'm sure I come across as 'the guy who always harps on about Spiritual Autolysis'. However: If you haven't heard of Autolysis, isn't the technique described by Jed McKenna as 'like self-enquiry on steroids'. It's a process by which you attempt to write the truth. Just try to write something that is true, then examine the foundations upon which that truth is based, then examine the foundations upon which those foundations are based, and so on, until you reach bedrock. I primarily use autolysis, and as a result I'm now in a point where I'm more or less in a process of self-enquiry 24/7. From this experience, the thing that I wonder about with self-inquiry, is that it can feel very easy to do, with very little result. I sometimes feel like people are sitting in meditation and occasionally politely asking themselves 'what am I?', and hoping for an answer. Which won't happpen. There is no forthcoming answer: that's the point. You have to DIG and DECONSTRUCT. It can sometimes seem like an 'every now and then during a meditation' approach is what it's about. But it's not. It's about disturbing the bedrock of your life. So I've been in a process of autolysis for about a year, after I read McKenna's Spiritual Enlightenment: the Damndest Thing. It immediately struck a chord. I've been writing for at least 20 minutes every day, but there have been some days where I've written for hours and hours. And then it carries on when you're not writing. It's a very addictive thing. That's how I got into it. As for changes I've noticed in my daily life: I have an entirely different perspective on my life, on other people, and how I react to 'negative' outside influences. I don't believe a lot of the shit that my ego was so afraid of before, and I can actively recognise when my ego is trying to re-construct itself based around new stimuli. No-self experiences. I don't know. I've had a number of experiences where my perspective has fundamentally shifted for temporary periods. One was similar to that which Leo describes in his video about being at a meditation retreat. Others were very different. But there was always an "I" hiding in the background. That's the thing. It's always there, but hiding. However, I'm now at a point where I recognise "I" so clearly, that I understand the stillness that various teachers refer to. I understand and feel the void, emptiness, whatever behind the experiences I am having, despite the fact that I am still identified with ego. Truth is, I'm always very wary of any idea of 'an experience', because it gives you an object and a target and an idea that the Truth is something like an emotion or a sense or anything else that lives in your perspective. It's not. I can feel that. I can't tell you what it IS, but I can tell you it's not that

Something that has been helping me to re-centre myself when my mind starts running away and drift into fantasy-land: What is happening?

Perhaps this belongs in the thread about optical illusions, but for me this sums up my understanding of "I" perfectly. Spending a while contemplating this, and how I perceive/build reality, has done a lot.