SOUL

@ivankiss Thirty plus years of trying to explain the simple nature of well being has led me to get creative with it and each generation has their way of connecting to things or it winds up that the simple sounds boring. Well being is exciting for me, it's amazing and I hope everyone will experience it in their lifetime. You did a great job in the opening post, I just used the same premise and spun it more succinctly. An expanded explanation is useful, too. Just ask Leo, he's a master of the expanded explanation. In my life I don't often have 3 hours to explain things so I have an elevator pitch for liberation from self suffering.

@ivankiss Yea, nowadays, we have to compare things to computers or video games otherwise the youth will tune it out.

Ego is a user interface that our awareness uses to navigate an appearance of environment and we can rewrite the code for it...well, we are always rewriting the code even if we don't think or know we are.

Isn't this essentially what I said to you in the 'feeling incomplete' thread you made? Although, he didn't touch on two aspects that seem to feed the 'broken' and 'incomplete' idea and feeling. Our desire, which includes all the different forms of yearning that express themselves in us physically, emotionally and psychologically. He did kind of hint at it by saying we continue to live life with the chop wood carry water tangent but to really hone in on how to overcome desire isn't to even overcome it. It's to not identify with the desire which often makes us feel 'broken' or 'incomplete'. We don't erase or dissolve desire, we just don't let it rule our being, it doesn't define our experience, it doesn't disturb our peace because our presence transcends desire. The other is expectations. We may find ourselves with the impression that things should, could and would be different and that different circumstance is where and when the complete and healed us is. He does kind of touch on that by stressing the now which is a powerful realization and his 'predict the future' bit alludes to expectation without using the word. Although, to really get a deeper insight into it this can be plainly said that expectation is one of the seeds of self suffering and discontent. Again, to not identify with them is to transcend them. You may say to me that these things I point to are obvious things we all know and understand but I'd reply with it isn't just knowing and understanding them, it's realizing them. Make them real in our experience, cease to identify with these things, and we rob them of the power to create self suffering in us. It doesn't mean we have to erase or dissolve them to be liberated, though we may weaken or quiet them through this but don't let a desire or expectation of dissolving them create separation from well being in us. Poor fella, he was laboring through that video and I did find it a little distracting, I thought he was going to barf at a couple of points. It is a testament to his resolve! I guess the old saying 'don't fix what isn't broken' has a new twist in meaning if applied to this topic.

If one imagines it to be that way, it is that way for them yet it is not that way for everyone. One doesn't have to imagine a dissolution of the dream to realize the absolute and sure, one can imagine it has to be that way so it is that way for them...but not everyone. One can transcend the dream so realize absolute awakening in an instant while the 'dream' remains as it is except our perception of the dream ceases to be a dream, we recognize it as reality. One could say that to be asleep is to be dreaming but awake the dream ceases to be it.

We can imagine it to be a gradual state of lucidity and that would be a conceptual paradigm that separates awareness from absolute realization because one imagines it to be that way so pushes it off to some imagined 'future' time. Even to imagine that absolute realization has to take a certain form of experience can be an obstacle to realizing absolute wakening in present experience.

There is no separation between 'enlightened' and not so once this is realized it doesn't make any sense to point to that distinction since it doesn't exist. It is those who don't realize it that will point to the separation because their mind creates it for themselves so are 'not'.

You aren't ready for a genuinely enlightened teacher, I can tell by your posts so I won't be offering any advice at this time.

Yes...and it's closed minded rhetoric when he could have easily stripped the advice of gender regardless if it was his father telling a son this and presented it as suitable for all people....which it is. Of course, right wing traditionalist grifting is very profitable and allows him to avoid being called woke which apparently is the most evil thing to be according to his target audience. Understand my point yet?

That's my point though....it's closed-minded stuff to think this is gendered advice from him. Or course I only looked at your list and didn't watch the video so maybe he says it's good advice for all in it.

So a woman or nonbinary person shouldn't adhere to this? It should be for everyone...but sure...a 'man', too.

Your direct realization can not change one iota about the sun and moon, just change your perception of them. We can believe the sun and the moon are no more real than the one who perceives them but the sun will burn us nonetheless and the moon winks from the sky at the hubris.

You can go deeper and deeper into the mystical rhetoric all you like but the reality is the sun and moon don't require your attention to rise and set. Both will do so no matter what or how you perceive them. Reality doesn't change according to your perception of it yet our perception of it changes with the conditions we view it through.

Perception isn't reality, it's how we perceive life and the conditions we place on it will alter our view of it but there is a genuine reality that our perception of it doesn't change what it actually is. This very real distinction gets blurred by the mystical notions of 'we create our reality' that is fostered in the solipsistic belief. Things like 'perfection' and 'good/evil' to a degree are subjective perspectives that are more flexible in experience of life within our perception but the moon doesn't disappear just because we aren't looking at it. 'Ye are gods but will die like mortal men'.

In life one can perceive a bus racing towards them while standing in its path as harmless but the bus doesn't change its harmfulness because of one's perception of it.

Beautifully said yet if I were to amend one aspect of this it would be that the conditions one places on existence the less perfect life that is it perceived as. The perfection of life doesn't change because of the conditions one would place on it but the perception of life will appear less than perfect to those who use a conditional filter to view it. Does this make sense?

Or contemplate less. Our ego is the master of lacking always seeking something else to fill its identity. Always one more thing to do or have to be complete. The only real step in finding completion is stop looking for it and just be it because we are already it. Then everything we do is an expression of fullness overflowing into every facet of life. We are so complete that we pour out the abundance of existence instead of try to fill a hole that doesn't exist.

The absence of the void is so complete in its absolute emptiness it is the source of all existential yearning in the manifest as the fullness of god in its abundance seeks to fill it. To resolve this in our awareness to be at peace with the absolute fullness and absolute emptiness coexisting in oneness produces the experience of liberation and cessation of self suffering.

This is the very root of desire, a yearning for something, an emptiness, a lacking and to quench this 'feeling' and 'experience' is the cessation of self suffering. Realize completion and perfection so it quenches the existential yearning, it satiates that desire which keeps the wheel spinning in our soul thus the infinite stillness can emanate from our being. It is pure holism.

The void is devoid of everything and anything at all...no awareness, no consciousness, no god, no love , no thing at all...it is absolute in its absence. So nobody is there. I know this because I regularly go to the edge of the void and dangle my 'feet' off the edge of god like a kid does off the edge of a cliff....but only the edge, because the void is unblemished by any existence at all.

They are exactly the same in that they are both the pursuit of what is true but if you told a philosopher they are doing spirituality they'd disagree and if you told a seeker they are doing philosophy they would also disagree. The seeker will protest that their pursuit is from direct experience though this takes place in the imagination and a philosopher will say their pursuit is from reason yet this also takes place in the imagination. Both of these people will also claim that their pursuit doesn't rely on belief with one pointing to their experience and the other to their logic but both rely on what they trust is true which is the definition of to believe. So the difference between spirituality and philosophy is merely the spelling and what one chooses to call their pursuit.

I guess if everything is really nothing the better question to ask is if it's possible to understand nothing.

The original state of being doesn't require doing to be, although, awareness might be considered the original something 'done' by being as being awareness. Some might even consider being to be the original something awareness ever 'does' as awareness being. Some may also consider this the origin of the manifest with awareness and being coexisting in absolute consciousness. Once we find peace in simply being, peace meaning the absence of conflict so it is the cessation of self suffering, then all the things we associate with well-being are expressed through everything in life we 'do' such as love, joy, contentment, fulfillment, etc. We have those things in simply being and are expressed through all we do, we bring it to instead of derived from what we do.

Which is why the term detachment doesn't express what unattached really is. Detachment implies having to do something to sever an attachment one has while unattached suggests something that isn't attached. If our genuine state is unattached then we don't have to detach, we just realize the unattached state of being. Not to be contrary to what is quoted but even 'releasing attachment' implies we have to do something in releasing to be in that unattached state but really we don't need to do anything to be unattached except be unattached.

....absent-minded might be more apropos, hm