UnbornTao

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The purpose of this journal is to share questions, humor, miscellaneous creative content, and raw reflections on personal empowerment and consciousness. My goals are to deepen my experiential understanding of these topics, improve my communication skills, have fun, and help others see things in a new light.

Yeah, recognizing a belief for what it is tends to undermine our certainty in it; it is seen as invented and adopted, and therefore not true in itself. But how deep does belief go? We might assume it is just a trivial notion we hold in our minds. There may be deeper layers to it, though. What do you take for granted about any aspect of reality? What do you think is true about X and Y? (These are meant to be contemplated.)

That doesn't make it true, though. This is more of the same performative charity. For starters, seriously consider the possibility that your position comes from a closed-minded stance, a particular cosmology or way of seeing the universe. The fact that you tend to associate drug experiences with so-called awakening strongly hints at this. Again, if you're color-blind, I guess you're shit out of luck when it comes to having a Blue awakening. The bells and whistles of "experience" can easily be conflated with a breakthrough. There's nothing you're aware of that is outside of your experience. Revisiting the other threads may help clarify this distinction, but listening is necessary. Sometimes we think we're after the truth when, in reality, we're chasing a fantasy. At some point, I was in your position too. I took my 5-MeO breakthrough experiences to be far more significant than they actually were. In hindsight, I see those episodes as powerful events but ultimately meaningless - and certainly not "awakening." I'm not retroactively making or creating anything out of those experiences in my mind; they were essentially the same effect the chemical has on everyone else. It was self-deception based on wishful thinking and ignorance of what a direct encounter actually is. At this point, if you haven't listened to Ramana, Adi Da, and the others, I don't think you'll drop this belief of yours. It's clear you're committed to Leo's notion. The "cult" remark mostly refers to the relationship many people seem to develop toward this work, which is clear from an outsider's perspective. Take into account the self-validating nature of belief systems.

Oh, that's not the reason at all. I welcome that teaching style.

Taking it as an invalidation is definitely a common reaction. It's almost automatic. Nobody likes to hear that X or Y is a so-called illusion - especially when it's something they value and enjoy doing, and even more so when it involves things like the self, life, or existence. By the way, I Iiked the purgatory bit. Not sure what that process is about, though. It seems that we're so involved in our "bubbles" that it is hard to see them for what they are. It's easy to assume that these things are already understood simply because the associations we make in our minds after hearing such claims feel like the same thing as the truth they point to. In other words, believing that something is an illusion without having had the direct consciousness behind those claims is a kind of pretension. It's an adopted idea, at the end of the day. Do we know that life is an illusion? Only intellectually, perhaps. It's likely we have yet to truly grasp it. The opposite might turn out to be true as well - there may be nothing more real than this. I'm not sure I'd say that something has to matter. Something exists, and then we may generate the importance it has relative to us. For our survival, things definitely have to mean something, though. Still, it seems to me that statements of this kind are fully understood when you see that both observations can coexist: you can engage in any pursuit wholeheartedly and, at the same time, see it for what it is in its essence, like building a sandcastle. You know that in the end it doesn't really matter, it will disappear, and it doesn't mean anything by itself, existentially. But you make sure to enjoy, suffer, and live the experience of building the sandcastle while you can. That's life. Sorry, a bit all over the place.

With all the threads on this topic, one might as well pay closer attention to them. But you keep insisting on your cosmology. Okay. Arrogance can sometimes show up through a veneer of spirituality. Closed-mindedness, too, can be made to appear as its opposite, it only has to look open. Perception itself is a process. For example, ask a color-blind person what purple has that is absolute. You need to put the pipe down and stop labeling experiences as "awakening" so flippantly. It's essentially a very elaborate and unconscious form of confirmation bias. The cult awakening was also dead sober for me. To bridge that gap, revisit the pertinent threads.

This is what a cult does to one's thinking. Oh, I forgot you guys were talking about experiences with the psychedelic drugs.

Keep at it. And remember to do it experientially, not just think about it.

Maybe. But it keeps bugging you, so there's likely still more to be grasped about the emotion. Let the thoughts arise but more importantly, let the anger arise. See what you can uncover about it. It looks like the anger just arises on its own. This is convincing, and it's what we tend to assume. But it might not be true. Try to pay attention to what you do prior to feeling anger. Maybe it is you who generates it, and the circumstances merely help you create it. Anyway, the theory is easy on paper. In practice, it can be more challenging. Good luck.

Yes, it can feel that way. To be clear, there's a difference between letting the anger arise on the one hand, and acting out it on the other. Feeling it without suppressing it nor acting it out is what I'm talking about here.

Not necessarily. Perhaps it's like playing a game. The recognition that it is a game doesn't prevent you from taking it seriously, fully enjoying it, or mastering it. It just means you know that, in the end, it's an invention - completely meaningless on its own and ultimately unnecessary. But then you have to do the dishes and walk the dog, so that's that.

It's an activity you are actively generating, not a curse. You want it (unconsciously) because it is serving a function for you. Maybe start by allowing yourself to feel the anger completely. No need to act it out, just feel it. Then you'll be in a better position to ask what anger is and why you are feeling it in this case. Investigate your experience of the anger as it occurs. What is it? Find out what it is for real. What makes up the emotion? For example, it seems to me that it exists in relation to a past time. It's about something that has passed, even if only a millisecond ago.

Yeah, that seems to be the case.

You could reflect on why you feel hurt - let's assume for the moment that this pain is what anger is based on. It's a tricky topic. Even though it seems like circumstances are causing your emotional state, it's actually you who are generating it, including the anger. The tricky part is turning this abstract idea into a real insight. For example, you can probably feel anger toward your father even when he isn't physically present. What does that tell us about the emotion?

It's interesting that you brought up nonduality, as if we were contrasting one philosophical system with another. Still, is the absolute a state? You speak of insanity, this and that, abstract, dimension, process. It's tempting to think of infinity as an ever-expanding room that gets filled with items, like outer space. Mentally grasping that an absolute is absolute is relatively easy. Even then, as a notion, it is itself relative. It is everything and all-encompassing. In our minds, it could be formulated as "everything is absolute. There is nothing that is not absolute - including nothing." But claiming that a cauliflower is absolute muddies up the waters, in my view. We don't even perceive the thing itself. It's likely that people end up believing that the concept of a cauliflower is somehow not relative, even though that notion might not have precise boundaries and is rather abstract and non-objective. And "profound" is relative - a property that appears only in relation to what is not profound. As for form and no-form: aren't they relative, too? What makes something relative is that it is particular and defined, including formlessness. How it shows up in our experience is as a discrete thing. It is not every thing that exists - it is "that" thing. Our experience of everything is relative. At some point, we might claim things like: everything is relative, nothing is relative, everything is absolute, nothing is absolute - plus both and neither, and/or both or neither. How would that help us begin to mentally unpack this topic? (Not that it could be done through those means, to be clear). I'd stick with "everything is relative" as the common ground of our shared experience. I'm absolutely astonished and relatively excited.

Fair enough. I was thinking that being original is different from being different from others - like dressing up differently, having a different appearance. It may not be about novelty either. The etymology of originality is something like "being at the source."

I don't know, Rick. Like with the multiple infinities, or the "beyond absolute" bit. It's all relative. Are you sure you're not talking about a state? Absolute Dis-may-a Awakening. Also, what makes you think I'm talking about nonduality, or coming from that stance?

When you say that something does not exist when it is not imagined - referring to a distinction - you are speaking of a relative thing. It is recognized only through contrast with that which it is not. At this point, you could take any relative thing and qualify it as Absolute - Absolute Pain Awakening, for example - which would be silly. The thing exists precisely by virtue of being relative. Pain is not absolute. Absolute (Relative Thing, Process, Activity) Awakening.

It is relative, then. It's like the Absolute Cinema Awakening joke. You should've added absolute in quotation marks.

Yeah, that's the point