DocHoliday

@brovakhiin Someday....someday, yeah Julien is kinda trying, I'll give him that, but...well, they're both sooo so far away from actually waking up. But hey, it's fun to watch

Now that is a controversial topic, or what...?:P I felt like sharing these two videos of Alan Watts with you that will "enlighten" your perspective on spiritual practices and spirituality in and of itself - why it is practiced, how it is practiced and what the whole deal about all of that "seeking" is. So, if you've got a spare hour or two I'd highly encourage you to take the time and invest it in these two videos. They can almost be regarded as two bonus videos on a Leo-Sunday-Video-Day. !! The second video's title is actually quite deceptive because the video doesn't explicitely inform about its title but much rather about what has obviously been described in my preface. !!

@thesmileyone Yeah I can but just partially. You need to listen to it in its entirety, it's worth it, trust me.

@thesmileyone Pay me and I'll give you some:P Sry, it would require me to watch them again and currently, I don't really wanna do that.

@Nahm Sure, sure...the question of "Why?" will never lead us anywhere in particular, that's why we generally refrain from asking it because there will always be another "Why?" remaining.

@Nahm Don’t you know better yourself? The realisation that there is no separate self. Now please, don’t start with that “who’s the one to know that”-sort of talk, I’m pretty tired of that to be honest. We really have to come to terms with our absolute and relative understanding. Prior to enlightenment we couldn’t make sense of the absolute but post enlightenment we “gained” the first-hand experience of it and therefore we realised that the relative is and was always incorporated within the absolute all along. But that doesn’t mean that now there is no more relativity and that everything is absolute, that’s stupid and just wrong. There are still distinctions between things and there is still relative knowledge to be acquired and therefore there are still distinct realisations to be made. Or wouldn’t you agree that “new knowledge” for example about your car or about your body in a medical sense is personal and individual to your own finite mind? Enlightenment is highly individual in that sense, it’s not a collective experience just as knowledge is individual and relative.

That’s also quite true. The only thing they have in common is their realisation but apart from that, “enlightened people” can be/are just like everybody else. (Haha, there’s a double entendre in there...)

@Monkey-man Of course they do, that's their thing. When enlightenment occurs, you don't really gain any additional knowledge or insights served to you on a silver plate. The only thing (basic) enlightenment (that is to say the realisation of your true nature) will do for you is, it will show you how the seperate self you thought to be is a complete illusion. Beyond that, there's obviously still a lot more "to do" and to discover because enlightenment is not the end-all-be-all, it's just the beginning. With enlightenment you have kind-of acquired the ultimate tool to sucessfully ask those questions in the most effective way, so that's why it's mostly a completely automatic thing for "enlightened people" to do such inquiry. They want to know simply for the sake of knowing but they don't necessarily "gain" anything from that.

@JustinS Yeah bruh, that's what my signature is about, right there... He should have just let her to it all by herself instead of wanting her to move and be still afterwards:P That's her most profound moment right there, that's her realisation. I've experienced the same kind of non-stop hysterical laughter for like half an hour straight. I just couldn't stop, everytime I looked at anything, especially other people around me, I just had to start laughing all over again as if they told me the most hillarious joke, even though the only thing they did was just being present.

@phoenix666 Not necessarily because you already know too much and even if you should fall back...you will only participate in those activities until they really start to fuck you up - until you pull the brake yourself and you will tell yourself "enough is enough, let's grow up here". But that's juts an assumption, it certainly doesn't always happen this way, but surely most of the times.

@JustinS That's a good question. I personally think it depends whether or not the individual is already living a happy and fulfilled life. When you advertise "the path of seeking" and "enlightenment" to those kinds of people, it will only confuse them and they will be probably repelled by it, but I guess in the end everybody who wants to seek, will ultimately start to seek on their own. That's why spirituality and enlightenment mustn't be preached to others as if it's the thing everybody ought to do. It's normally been said that when the teacher is ready, the student will appear, but I think it also goes the other way in the sense that when the "student" is ready to be taught, he will find the teacher or the teaching, more or less. But as always, "The fool who persists in his folly, will become wise" ~ William Blake. So one way ot the other, at some point realisation (of any kind - not necessarily enlightenment) will occur.

@Joseph Maynor I don't know what that "now" is you're talking about... Might be...might be that it's always changing and staying the same but I don't really care about that to be honest. To me, that's just further mental masturbation, I don't really think contepmlating this "paradox" will bring you anywhere specifically, other than to where you already are now.

I thought I'd post something less controversial today, which involves a very small and simple but highly effective technique to catch yourself and realise that time and especially the past, is not real and merely an illusion and only a dream. The technique involves "watching" yourself as if you would look at yourself in a movie through an exterior camera. So for exapmle, half an hour ago I just woke up here in Germany and made myself breakfast. While I was walking around the kitchen to get all the differnt things I needed, right after I grabbed one thing and walked on, I asked myself "Where was that "you" just 5 seconds ago?" - "Where was that "you" just 1 second ago?", and I let a short movie of that activity that I just executed run in my mind as if there was an exterior camera at the time filming me. I repeated this multiple times just for the fun of it and what will ultimately happen is that this will put you right in touch with the "infinite now" (even though the concept of a "now" still involves (non-existent) time, I know that). So this will to some degree show you that all of this, reality, your whole life is nothing but maya - it's all illusion, it's all happening within absolute consciousness and you're right there, you're right in it. I hope this was helpful to you, I'd love to hear from you guys if you've tried this out for yourselves and want to share your experience.

@Monkey-man Which animals would that be? Never heard of them before, sounds really interesting

@SOUL That's unfortunate.

...and was never born either. I'm watching a lot of Rupert Spira's youtube content right now and at one point he described it in a very beautiful way, comparing life and death to deep-sleep and the waking state, he said (paraphrasing): "It's just the contraction of consciousness in one focused point and the relaxing of it - going back to its source." So this means that while you're in the waking state (awareness is aware of itself), consciousness is focused and compressed on one particular point, which is "you" or your finite mind in other words. In deep-sleep or death, this compression relaxes and falls back into its ultimate, absolute form of being. Therefore the waking state and deep-sleep are just shorter cycles but absolutely identical to the "physical" birth and death of our bodies.

@Epiphany_Inspired Thanks for the compliment, I can totally see what you're saying here:)

@Mighty Mouse Relatively sure

@Mighty Mouse Oh boy, here we go again...

@Joseph Maynor is totally right on this point. If we were to get rid entirely of all conclusions, beliefs and concepts, this forum might just as well be completely empty. It's all maya - it's all fake, but we can't help ourselves to not make use of fakeness, so, (watch out here comes the big conclusion!) it would be best to sincerely acknowledge our thoughts and concepts and just establish distance between them in terms of our identification with them. We cannot under any circumstances be without an ego at any times because even the act of de-identifying with absolutely everything automatically becomes our new identification (the one who de-identifies with everything).

@SOUL Haha. that's exactly what I was saying. But I do indeed apologize if I came off during this discussion as somewhat condescending or arrogant or egocentric because I certainly didn't intend to do so. If I could, I'd give you a hug right now. All is well in the end, right?

@DrMobius Brilliant!

I realise that language is indeed a tricky and difficult tool to use in order to describe what I mean/meant here. There are certainly numerous valid and totally justified points of reasoning from all of you guys. What other way of things happening could there ever be? Surely, you could also say "everything happens as it can happen", but that's once again only referring to the sheer potential of how things can/could happen. But what I'm actually getting at here is the particular occurrence of things that actually "do happen". For example, when one person aggravates and ceaselessly insults another, eventually the one who's been insulted will punch the other one in the face. This happens because it must happen. On the other hand, in case the one who's being insulted is highly advanced in self actualisation and will not take the insults as seriously and decides to not punch him in the face - this also, happens because it must happen in this way, you see? Even vice versa if the self-actualised guy did punch the other guy in the face, that still happened because it must have happened this way. So, again, I'm not talking about the potential of things to happen but I'm talking about the actual act of the happening itself. This is what I mean when I said "things are as they are/everything is as it is". When a tree crashes onto my car, then I guess this is as it is and there's nothing changing that. Of course, one could come in with his (in this case absolute ridiculous and redundant) non-dual argumentation of "Well, it is and it simultaneoulsy isn't, so don't worry about it!". Fuck that, there is a tree rammed into the windshield of my car and that's how it is in this instance, so consequently, the tree falling onto my car happened as it must have happened, there's no way around that. Also, even though I did actually say in my opening post that "everything that could happen, will happen at some point (in consciousness)", I didn't really mean it in the sense that "absolutely everything just has to happen at some point" because in that statement the happening and non-happening of a particular event or occurrence is implied at the same time. So, even if something does not happen, this non-happening is still true to the statement "everything happens as it must happen". I apologize for phrasing it in such a weird way. Therefore, if something appears, it appears as it must appear and when something does not appear, it also does not appear, as it must.

@Serotoninluv That's right, that shit goes deep... that's what pretty much most of the times I'm trying to get across to people anyways.

Indeed a very beautiful video! You might also like this one...