UnbornTao

@CoolDreamThanks @Princess Arabia Easy.

If I get rigorous with myself, a couple of "direct" ones at most. The other type, much more. They don't mean anything though, they are what they are -- an experience (of love, terror, bliss, profound wonder, union with the universe, etc). When going through them, it is easy to get swept away by them. It is consciousness of your nature. Not special at all, can occur for everyone, but likely much less common than people make them out to be. I just want to make sure we don't assume that enlightenment is an experience or a perception, even if it is an unusual, intense one. Better to leave it as an unknown that's possible for you.

It's Ralph all the way down.

I should have clarified that by letting them be, I meant your feelings. Experiencing things tends to dissolve them. Okay. Also stop beating yourself up, that's a start.

nah, joking.

You know who I hate? Those Buddhist beggars. All bald and annoying. plot twist i'm one

I write how it comes naturally for me. Has always been like this. Effective, honest and concise is what I aim for.

I beat you to it

Something like that, yes. You're welcome. Enjoy.

Appreciate it, you're welcome.

Who said that living a normal life correlates with having a weaker intention to find truth? Pursue mastery, transformation, and the absolute. You can live and take periods of intense contemplation, but I doubt many people will do that long-term.

Maybe everything about the person is appearance. Doesn't "person" mean mask in latin? Something to think about. About your concerns, you don't need to judge others nor yourself. If you do, be clear that judgments are usually superficial, quick, simplistic assessments based on impressions. Some might be accurate, depends on intuition, but are still rather shallow opinionizing. For example, I might be addicted to the internet, and from that you jump to conclusions about my life, etc.

What are relationships? What is another? What are emotions? What is skill? How can you transform yourself and master something? Pursue both relative and absolute truth. Could be, I don't know.

@ivankiss Yeah, or you'd like to believe it will achieve what you want. Either way, might as well enjoy it.

Investigate the relationship between your unwillingness to being present with the experience of anxiety.

If you think that engaging in that process, or any process for that matter, is getting you nearer your nature, you're fantasising. Near is too far. Again, get clear on what the purpose for any given activity is.

Good luck getting enlightened by hearing spiritual-sounding melodies.

Live life and contemplate. You don't have to become a monk in order to get enlightened.

Let them be first, neither act it out nor suppress. Enjoy being the victim. You're doing that because it gets you something. I'd suggest you acknowledge your experience as it is by letting it be completely, and look into it. Then unnecessary activities are organically dropped.

No bite taken. I said it is what it is. Not dismissing it, rather I'm making a distinction between feeling good and seeking out what's true. Meditations of this nature might belong, rather than to awakening, to the domain of personal transformation -- mind mastery, perhaps. Easy to fall into fantasy; get clear on what the purpose for the activity is.

@Carl-Richard Inaccurate but bears repeating: What's done within the dream, occurs within dream. For instance, you could drink coffee while dreaming, hoping that that will wake you up. Maybe it helps in some way from your current point of view. In the dream, doing so may make sense as you're stuck within it and can't see beyond it. In this analogy, we can see that this mindset doesn't apply. The waking up is a different domain than the dreaming. You wake up whenever you do irrespective of the dreaming. I've said methods can help focus the mind, etc. As human inventions, few methods seem to be purely aimed at direct consciousness, even though many of them may offer that as a selling point. Many methods are plain ineffective and misleading, a set of superstitious rituals that require adherence to their cosmology in order to get a sense of progress towards the promised results. Besides, as the final destination isn't known by us but imagined, we have to trust what the practice stipulates as the end goal, hoping for the best. As tools, we use methods to achieve certain ends. The mind might want to come up with a way to understand this subject, inventing a method to get there -- it doesn't work that way. For example, you might have an enlightenment just after hitting your head against the kitchen counter, but the relationship is made up by your mind. Just so with any other method. No method can possibly produce enlightenment; it can help in taming the mind by giving it some toy to chew on -- a discipline, an object of contemplation, etc. And then somehow enlightenments occur. It is paradoxical. Can't find yourself, since everywhere you look for is relative, and yet wondering and intent seem to help in grasping it. I still think you're holding the matter as relative, so when you experience something unusual and powerful, you think of that as awakening. When you talk of uncertainty, complexity, and spontaneity, you're talking about something experienced, even if preceded by intense meditation. They don't apply to the Absolute. It is true now. No change needed. Our experience is relative, which doesn't mean one's nature is relative too. We might have gotten too far with the speculation and intellectualizing, which is what this is. You are not a perception. What are the implications of the above assertion, assuming that it is true? What can be done within the domain of experience that somehow produces such a leap? How can you manipulate yourself and your experience, the condition you're in, into having absolute consciousness? We're back at square one. Anything we come up with and have adopted about, enlightenment, is bullshit, a distraction from the real work. Better get busy contemplating! In the end, it doesn't matter how you arrive at the truth, as long as you do.

I'd add that it is not a state but you. You might be experiencing boredom and yet you're still you independent of experience. Feeling good is feeling good.

OUOUHOUHOUH. Might as well be hearing the traffic jam. One has a positive effect, the other might not. Depends on you. You're producing powerful mind states, perhaps because you want to feel good, that's OK. Better not to conflate this with getting nearer your nature. A feeling of joy is different from a feeling of boredom; you do experience these as fluctuations in state. Ask yourself what you are doing and what the purpose for the activity you're engaging in is. That helps clear things up. Enjoy the melody -- and the meditation.

Who? What? Stand on nothing when questioning, otherwise what you're looking for is people validating your conjectures.