How Did You First Come To Know About Enlightenment?

[actualized3434]

How did you come to know about this whole thing? At some point in life, you should have read a book, article, watched a video or talked to a friend who told you about enlightenment and that it is a way out of suffering.. How did it happen?

I came to know about it after watching a video many years ago. I don't even remember the name of the guy who spoke in the video and don't have the video link. But I went through the comments of the video and came across many words talking about enlightenment, buddha, Ramana Mahirishi, vedanta etc... Only then I started some serious reading on the subject and started to practice various meditations, self-inquiry etc...

[eputkonen]

1 hour ago, actualized3434 said:

How did you come to know about this whole thing? At some point in life, you should have read a book, article, watched a video or talked to a friend who told you about enlightenment and that it is a way out of suffering.. How did it happen?

I came to know about it after watching a video many years ago. I don't even remember the name of the guy who spoke in the video and don't have the video link. But I went through the comments of the video and came across many words talking about enlightenment, buddha, Ramana Mahirishi, vedanta etc... Only then I started some serious reading on the subject and started to practice various meditations, self-inquiry etc...

For me, I heard about self-realization when I read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (the first spiritual book I read).  Not long after, I read a little Buddhism and heard about enlightenment and the end of suffering.

But self-realization and enlightenment were terms with little to no meaning for me...with definitions that seemed to vary depending on who was talking...and so I never really sought it.  Instead, I spent 13 years in generic spiritual seeking...chakras, past lives, kabbalah, mysticism, magick, etc.  I also read the Bible, the Quaran, the Bhagavad Gita, and hundreds of books of various spiritual topics.  I never suffered much...so I never sought a way out of suffering.  I just wanted to know the Truth.  That was all.

[actualized3434]

@eputkonen nice... have you ever experientially felt the chakras.. I hear a lot about chakras but I wonder how they ever found that they exist.. How did they come up with 7 chakras and not ten? How did they exactly figure out the locations of chakras..

Do you remember your past lives? Do you think reincarnation is real?

[eputkonen]

16 minutes ago, actualized3434 said:

@eputkonen nice... have you ever experientially felt the chakras.. I hear a lot about chakras but I wonder how they ever found that they exist.. How did they come up with 7 chakras and not ten? How did they exactly figure out the locations of chakras..

Yes.  Have you not felt love deep within your heart?  Love seems to naturally reside at the "heart center". 

How the number and locations were determined...I don't know.  I don't care that much about chakras to worry about these questions.

 

Quote

Do you remember your past lives? Do you think reincarnation is real?

Yes, I have some memories of past lives.  Reincarnation happens.  But so what?  One night you dream you are an adventurer like India Jones, the next night you dream you are a race car driver with wife and family...each night you reincarnate (so to speak) into another dream-life...but looking into these dream-lives will not help you realize you are dreaming (and become a lucid dreamer).  The past has passed...let it go.

[actualized3434]

@eputkonen  Please tell me about your past lives... in which country and in which time period were you born? what language did you speak?

[eputkonen]

9 minutes ago, actualized3434 said:

@eputkonen  Please tell me about your past lives... in which country and in which time period were you born? what language did you speak?

For what reason?

[actualized3434]

@eputkonen  please don't ignore this question by asking what reason... If you have authentic past life memories, you wouldn't mind sharing it here I think... A part of significance of the whole enlightenment thing is getting out of the cycle of rebirths.. I always used to wonder, what if it is not true.. what if reincarnation is a myth? But you are telling me that you remember past lives, so I really want to know more about it.. I have thousands of reasons that I can't really explain in a single post.

If you don't mind, please tell me  in which country and in which time period were you born? what language did you speak?

[Joseph Maynor]

From Leo.  I hated the concept at first. 

[eputkonen]

6 minutes ago, actualized3434 said:

@eputkonen  please don't ignore this question by asking what reason... If you have authentic past life memories, you wouldn't mind sharing it here I think... A part of significance of the whole enlightenment thing is getting out of the cycle of rebirths.. I always used to wonder, what if it is not true.. what if reincarnation is a myth? But you are telling me that you remember past lives, so I really want to know more about it.. I have thousands of reasons that I can't really explain in a single post.

If you don't mind, please tell me  in which country and in which time period were you born? what language did you speak?

None of my past lives (that I remember parts of) were historical or noted figures...there is no way to verify.  And so there would be no way for you to know if what I am recounting is a past life or a story I am making up on the fly.  Also, this is a distraction from realizing enlightenment.  I let my past go long ago...let me leave it in the past.  Furthermore, this is off topic from the discussion at hand.

[actualized3434]

@eputkonen  I understand it is off topic.. but I can't help asking this question though because i used to wonder if reincarnation is really true or not... For me, these things don't distract my path because I have grown in the path enough to see these things as totally separate and related to the objective world.. I always have curiosity about objective world and I wonder with questions of scientific nature.. and I see this similar to that.. I don't care about my own past lives and don't really have interest to know about them but I would like to find out if reincarnation exists or not.. 

When I say historical, I am not talking about a famous figure... I didn't assume that you should have been a famous figure in the past life.. But f you really remember a past life incident, even a memory of one incident may reveal a lot of things... For example, If you remember an incident where you were in a market in some part of the world and in sometime in the past,  you would see something entirely different in that memory.. You probably remember  people of different skin color, wearing different types of clothes, speaking in a different language, standing near buildings that look a little different etc...   

Yes, you may be making up a story but you would get nothing out of it, there are a lot of other ways to get attention. So, i think that would be unlikely. But what I really want to find out is, if the memory you have is really a past life memory or a distorted memory from the current life that you honestly believe as a past life memory.. This happens to everyone and I think it is the nature of mind to distort memories, so this doesn't mean that the person who is reporting that memory is dishonest and not authentic.

But based on the memory you report, I think I can possibly guess if it was real past life memory or some memory of present life that you unconsciously concluded as your past life memory at some point of time.. I am pretty sure that sometimes these recollections are convincing enough for even a super intelligent person to believe that it happened in a past life..

[Prabhaker]

17 hours ago, actualized3434 said:

How did you come to know about this whole thing?

Born in India, heard about it since childhood. 

[krazzer]

My mom told me about it. She was also into spirituality and is also a psychologist. Haven't talked about it with her for years though. I might wanna do that again

[Nahm]

From the gynocologist who pulled me out and said "it's a boy!". i was like wtf you mean "it"???? and my pd journey had begun!

love you guys!

??

 

[Prabhaker]

36 minutes ago, Loreena said:

Not sure if it even exists or just another ego trip to the mental masturbatorium. 

Meditation is a gamble. In all other ways of gambling we put something at stake, and in meditation we put ourselves at stake, but only the gamblers know what life is.. Only those who gamble everything for truth are the blessed ones.

[Seeker_of_truth]

Leo's videos

[Shanmugam]

When I was a young boy, I heard about this from many books, especially from the Gospel of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa.. But it only made sense to me when I started reading Osho

[tyy]

Stumbled upon Leo's videos a couple years ago.. tried to forget what I heard I think, but ended up coming back!

[electroBeam]

back in high school. In the library I was scrolling through scientific books trying to figure out the connection between our theories and reality, and I stumbled upon a study that showed that 'we', our core self, wasn't localized anywhere in the brain. It was scattered so to speak. This led me to studying epistemology, which led me to one of Leo's videos.