Joseph Maynor

This is good to keep in mind. You can believe, but hold your beliefs loosely. Watch this video:

Because this video is awesome. This is the answer. The only answer you need. It's like looking at enlightenment from one perspective.

Smells are not my smells, yet smell sensations are Self-aware. Sights are not my sights, get sight sensations are Self-aware. Tastes are not my tastes, yet taste sensations are Self-aware. Feelings are not my feelings, yet feeling sensations are Self-aware. Sounds are not my sounds, yet sound sensations are Self-aware. Thoughts are not my thoughts, get thought sensations are Self aware. (You gotta distinguish the sensed aspect of a thought from the illusive thought-story.) => All of these experiences are Self-aware, yet none of them connect to an egoic self, to a me. => The me just is the individuated sensations, the Self, the field of sensory awareness. How can I get rid of the egoic center that wants to be the pinwheel of all these experiences?

Everything is absolutely relative from each perspective. Can we bootsrap the higher self from nothing? Higher self is explained in this video. Watch it before responding. Background prerequisite context:

@Natasha I think every answer a person could seek is contained in the existing Forum posts.

@Anna1 Wow. This is great. Total summary. I've tweaked your language a bit -- Come full circle and know everything is "the Self"(awareness/consciousness). All is one and there is nothing but us. A movie created by us, starring us, that we are watching.

@Shanmugam This sounds to Taoist to me. Did Lao Tsu travel to India? It's weird that Taoism and Buddhism are so similar. Maybe the Taoists traveled to India and that's where Buddhism came from. Kinda makes sense.

@SLICKHAWK When we repair our relationship with God, He repairs everything else for us.

@Natasha The gateless gate haha.

@Shanmugam You have inner feelings but any conceptualization of those feelings or identification of those feelings is a thought-story. The raw sensations are self-aware, that's it.

@Anna1 If you have no ego you don't really make distinctions anymore. Reality is just accepted as a whole. A lot of shit came together for me after I watched this video. Good job Leo! Watch this video

@Anna1 Not really. The more enlightened you are the less you will create emotions. You create all your emotions.

@Shanmugam I kind of agree with this. I don't really have too many emotions anymore. Last 30 days I've been 90% reduced in emotions, both positive and negative. The emotions I do have are all traceable to the ego or the body. My body wants more attention -- working out, diet, sleep, nutrition, etc. So I get that screaming at me. And then I get the ego causing some negative emotions due to believing in itself. With those, meditation seems to rid those the best. Just do nothing meditation 1 hour every morning.

@Anna1 Self-aware means the way that the perceptual field senses its contents of experience.

Enlightened people don't need rules for their morality. Enlightened people are like super-rebellious people who circled back to morality, but not by formulating dogma, but by learning to trust their higher selves 100%. This is where relativism and pragmatism marry and have a child. You can live your life, you can know morality, but you don't need to externalize it. And you can be openminded and not need to cling to any kind of knowledge about it. Just do what the higher Self wants. You have no control anyway. All you can do is cause increased awareness in your distributed system. Nature is the sum total of all causes. You are not outside of this system. 2 key videos on point to watch:

"Then why is it, that we feel out of sorts when we are sad, negative, angry, disappointed? Why do we pull ourselves back to happiness?" There is no you to be happy. That is the bad thinking. You need nothing to be happy. "Even unconscious people know it's not right when they are stressed, anxious, unhappy etc." "This is the entire point of life, to be happy, why do we have this bias between equanimity, happiness, calm, peace etc?" Watch these two videos: "Why are enlightened people so happy, so calm, so soothing, funny, all of these traits we know are good, if reality is nothingness?" Watch this one: And finally this one:

Curious

@Alii This is why enlightenment is the gateway to personal development. All your problems are illusions. Heaven is a choice you can make right now. And you don't need anything materially to enter Heaven. Once you let go, that's when you surge forward, paradoxically. It's funny that so much monkey-chatter is required to become enlightened, yet enlightenment is the absence of monkey-mind. That's the paradox of paradoxes. The highest paradox! Illusion is needed to become enlightened, yet enlightenment is the ditching of all illusion. So, all these people who pooh-pooh monkey-mind should realize it is a necessary path to enlightenment. You don't go from 10 to 40 without passing through 20 and 30 first. It's real easy to stand at 40 and say -- yeah don't worry about theory, just practice. This is not how it works. You gotta chew theory until your mouth is bleeding from all corners, and you finally stand there exhausted thinking -- I get that this ain't gonna work now. But you have to get there, you can't just realize this intellectually and bypass the screwing-up. This is a banging-your-head-against-the-wall kind of getting, not some epiphany you get reading a book listening to Mozart in the comfort of your feather bed. You didn't learn how to walk by reading a book. You stumbled around and finally came to the result over time. Same thing with enlightenment. You stumble into and out of one trap and into the next one. Smarties are just people who see where you are and likely don't see where they are. It takes another smarter-smartie to identify the smartie's trap, and so on and on ad infinitum.

@Nahm Toe sensations are self-sensing. Getting rid of that mine is gonna be tough.

First one is theory. Second one is pragmatic.

Seems like the final step is dropping need to know and need to believe. Releasing need to conceptualize reality, need for right answer, need for understanding and clarification.

@Dodo The Self is Absolute Infinity. Ego is more extensive than we believe: It is not just the I-thought. It is our entire human life. It is finite perspective. It is the belief that the distinction life-death is real. It is the illusion of feeling alive. It it feeling finite in any way; thingness is just a single distinction among many possible equally relative "sayings" about reality. Now I understand why Leo said true ego-death is like true physical death. This is not just a rearranging of beliefs. This is how the Self/Absolue Infinity be. How it be ain't got nothing to do with finiteness. This is a bigger enlightenment than most people consider. I say be because the Self/Absolute infinity is not a thought-story or an experience. It is a being of the Truth.

@Not a shaolin monk Absolute infinity is the Self. So, if you are not experiencing senses that cause you to conclude and sense the thought "the wall is real", then there is no thought-story about a wall existing. Reality is just one unified flow. All distinctions are finite. The wall is not a separate item existentially from the rest of the flow of Nature. In fact, thinking of those experiences as denoting a thing is a thought, thought-story, belief. All beliefs are existentially false. They may be good scaffolding, but beliefs are just more thought-stories, and therefore at odds with the Truth since all thought-stories are illusory. The Truth is egoless Self-aware experience. Experience is not belief. Beliefs are thoughts within the flow of experience. Beliefs try to define the Truth from being an experience within the Truth. Like an engineer thinking he can create a true human being through technology alone. See the problem? It's an unconscious ignorance, fantasy about reality. The Truth, reality contains no distinctions existentially, that is just a thought-story within the egoless, Self-aware field of sensations. A thought speaking way out of turn.

@Not a shaolin monk The wall doesn't exist. That's a thought-story. To say anything exists is conceptual. What is relevant is the sensations in your perceptual field in a moment.

All that is real is your sense experience, including thoughts sensed, but the meanings of the thoughts are illusory. So when you see your hand, what exists are the sensations sensed in that moment. When you turn away, you may still believe the hand exists, but what you're sensing there is a thought and a thought-story. The belief that your hand exists is a thought-story -- even if you are looking at your hand when saying this!