My Path To Somewhere, I Hope...

[abrakamowse]

11 minutes ago, 99th_monkey said:

whats zendo?

Zendo is the name of the Hall where people sit to meditate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo

[99th_monkey]

ahhhhh, i have back deck, front deck, a few rooms inside and a shed,.... mad zendos

 

[charlie2dogs]

On 2/21/2016 at 3:11 PM, abrakamowse said:

I was born in Uruguay, South America and I am actually living in New Jersey with my wife and our 9 year old daughter. I am 47 years old.

I was always curious about the unknown. My grandfather was a priest of an adventist church and he was in the military too. He never talked to me too much about religion, he died when I was a kid. But I remember that when we went to have lunch at my grandparents home, he always prayed and he was very thankful to God. I didn’t understand at that moment, but I accepted all that like something natural. Even though my mother and father weren’t very religious.

My father wasn’t much of a believer but I feel that he was curious too. My mother never talked about religion with me. But my father sparked my curiosity talking about stuff he thought about the bible. For example, I remember being like 6 years old and he told me that he thought that to make the animals fit on the Noah’s Ark, that should have been done with some kind of technology we didn’t know, because it was not possible to fit all them on the ark in their natural way, so maybe some more advanced beings helped Noah to get just the embryos (or other unknown technique) of the animals on the ark and then reproduce them some way. But this kind of things made me be very curious.

We talked also about the pyramids and how they were created, and he told me in the bible there were descriptions made by Moises where some things he saw seemed very similar to the idea that we have now of UFO and Aliens. So, I was very curious about all that stuff, and about everything.

Then my father died, he was diabetic. I was 16 when he died. I remember that I found a small bible on my high school that was given for free through the Gideons. And I took it home, it was the new testament and I read it all from the beginning to the end. Then, after many years my mother told me that I was all the time on the my bedroom laying on my bed reading the bible. Maybe that explains why I consider myself Christian, but I don’t share any belief with any official Christian Church. I am still looking for a Christian Church who tell the truth about Jesus.

I liked a lot the things Jesus said, but for me it was weird to think that he died for our sins (in the way the catholic and protestant church view it), and that only by believing he is the messiah you will be saved. It was ridiculous, but at the same time the Bible was very clear in that point. At least what I understood at that moment, so I was a bit interested in Jesus but not sure if the Bible was true, or accurate.

So, I had a friend who was going to a group were some people said they were “contacted” by aliens. The group was called Rama, it doesn’t exist now officially but I know there’s still people who meet and do meditation. The founder of the group was a Peruvian called Sixto Paz, he said he was contacted by Aliens and that he was on a mission to share their message. My friend invited me several times to go to some of those meetings, but I never accepted, because I didn’t know about the meditation they did. I only knew about the aliens stuff.  And I didn’t want to know anything about Aliens, lol. But then he told me they did buddhist meditation, so I became interested about learning how to meditate.

There I learned some meditation techniques but it was done in a manner that everyone gave their opinions about meditations, some knew, others not so much. So the meditations we did weren’t like the mindful meditation or the self-inquiry. No one that I heard of talked about no-self and concepts like that. So, it was useful for me because it introduced me to meditation, but it wasn’t really a deep kind of meditation to find your true self. They played a bit with mental stuff.

One of the things I remember was the first days I was there, we did a relaxation practice to then begin to meditate. When we were meditating we were told to do think whatever came to our minds. But I thought the idea was to let your imagination go wild and then try to look a significance to it , hehehehe… it was not very well guided.

They talked about your true self, they called it your “inner master”, and we made mental visualizations of that master and we asked him about things we wanted to know and we let that deep true self that we visualized to answer us. We really didn’t know  what we were doing hehehe… so funny now that I think about it.

In one of that meditative visualizations I saw a brigde. And in the other side of the bridge there was a native indian, looked like a shaman or something like that. I began to walk over the bridge, the bridge was made of wood and it was really in bad shape. It was like one of those bridges on the Indiana Jones movies.

So, I was walking with difficulty because it was very high, it was like crossing a canyon and the bottom was really deep. And there were some missing parts on the bridge so I had to pay attention to every place I stepped on. And in that moment, I thought…. if this is just my imagination, why can’t I fly over the bridge and cross it more easily?

So, I did that. I began to fly in my weird meditation and I was like flying between the canyon rocks, I felt like superman and suddenly a red light very strong appeared in front of me and everything went black.

I asked to my “inner master” what was that? And I heard like someone saying that something bad was going to happen and I had to defeat.

And this is all for today, my story is a bit long, so I will be posting more tomorrow. All this I said has to do with the next chapter of my boring life hahahaha…

Thanks for reading.

jesus was a master, not a religious person, and he cannot forgive your sins, only you can do that, but if you understood the esoteric meaning of the things he said, it would lead you to liberation,  and that is what salvation really is about,  the bible was written by the catholic church to control humanity,  they were religious people, jesus was not religious,  saying i believe doesnt do much for you but trap you in the belief itself.  drop the beliefs and you stand some chance of liberation, few have understood what jesus was, was about, what he taught, if in fact, he was real, i was not there, i cannot say, and i dont believe.  It is not about religion at all, its about becoming the master of your own being, and this would have been what jesus would have said to you.

[abrakamowse]

21 hours ago, charlie2dogs said:

jesus was a master, not a religious person, and he cannot forgive your sins, only you can do that, but if you understood the esoteric meaning of the things he said, it would lead you to liberation,  and that is what salvation really is about,  the bible was written by the catholic church to control humanity,  they were religious people, jesus was not religious,  saying i believe doesnt do much for you but trap you in the belief itself.  drop the beliefs and you stand some chance of liberation, few have understood what jesus was, was about, what he taught, if in fact, he was real, i was not there, i cannot say, and i dont believe.  It is not about religion at all, its about becoming the master of your own being, and this would have been what jesus would have said to you.

Thanks Charlie, right now I understand what are the true teaching of Jesus. Anyway in my error it helped me to understand surrendering, and to deny my ego. At that moment I thought that the ego was myself, now I know what he was talking about. That is not taught in any church right now.

 

I am writing the last part of all this that will explain better were I am know and what I learned from Jesus teachings, that is very different to what the church teach.

 

Thanks for reading!

Edited June 28, 2016 by abrakamowse

[abrakamowse]

4 hours ago, 99th_monkey said:

ahhhhh, i have back deck, front deck, a few rooms inside and a shed,.... mad zendos

 

Lol, cool @99th_monkey that's awesome.

 

[Mal]

@abrakamowse 

If this is any help, I have a religious friend who recently quoted parts of his scriptures to me and I interpreted them back to him from my perspective and he immediately threw away his beliefs and had a non dual experience.  Just off the back of me interpreting his religions passages from my perspective. 

And this guy is devout orthodox. No messing around kinda guy.  Totally bought into the b.s - God as a separate entity, an afterlife, the lot..

 

Edited June 28, 2016 by Mal

[abrakamowse]

4 hours ago, Mal said:

@abrakamowse 

If this is any help, I have a religious friend who recently quoted parts of his scriptures to me and I interpreted them back to him from my perspective and he immediately threw away his beliefs and had a non dual experience.  Just off the back of me interpreting his religions passages from my perspective. 

And this guy is devout orthodox. No messing around kinda guy.  Totally bought into the b.s.

 

Mal, I am going to post the whole process soon. I really didn't believe in the interpretation the church gives to the Bible. But I was so desperately seeking that I thought that maybe I was wrong, and I was ready to accept anything to try to know by experience if that was true or not.

For me it was like the maximum surrendering, it was not done in the "correct" way but it was the first time that I accepted to submit to "God". At that moment I didn't know exactly what God was, now for me the concept of God is Reality (not exactly but close).

I had some epiphanies there that confirmed my ego that I was in the right path, now I think I wasn't but I needed to understand something. I began to believe in the concept of "the devil" and I went paranoid. (Now I see the devil was the understanding old prophets had of the ego, that was how they "explained" it with the concepts of their times).

So, I had to choose to be paranoid or to surrender to reality. At that moment I was still believing or "kind of" believing, I think I was forcing me to believe in something, because that's what I thought. That you needed to believe to transcend. If it wasn't for that experience I never would have thought that we have not to believe to see reality as is. That was completely out of my understanding at that moment.

So, reading stuff from Calvinism I arrived to the conclusion that we have no free will and from there it was when I decided to trust in myself not in an outside dogma.

 

I will write more in detail soon.
:-)

Thanks Mal for reading and for your help!

 

And what happened to your friend "AWESOME"

Edited June 28, 2016 by abrakamowse

[abrakamowse]

Morality, concentration and wisdom!

[abrakamowse]

The Buddha was born under a tree.
The Buddha was Enlightened under a Bodhi tree.
The Buddha was grateful to the Bodhi tree
that sheltered Him before His Enlightenment.
It is said that He gazed at it in gratitude for seven days.
The Buddha taught in the shelter of trees and groves.
The Buddha passed into Parinirvana between two trees.

We see that the Buddha was one with nature and saw the importance of its relationship with us all. Respect nature. We belong to nature. Nature does not belong to us. Destroy nature and we destroy ourselves, for we are nature. Buddhism is a green religion! The next time you see a tree, be it a Bodhi tree or not, gaze at it respectfully. Realise the grand possibilities that might just happen because of this tree. The grandest thing that last happened under a tree was the Buddha's attainment of Enlightenment. Imagine that.

[abrakamowse]

I like the sound of the words "Buddha Nature"...

 

It's a shame there's no one to like it.

[abrakamowse]

I just discovered that I enjoy a lot being in total darkness.

[abrakamowse]

“The person who can freely acknowledge that life is full of difficulties can be free, because they are acknowledging the nature of life - that it can't be much else.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

[abrakamowse]

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
- Emerson

[abrakamowse]

There was walking yesterday when the bus stopped close to home, but no one was walking. There was just walk.

Then blinking happened, and no one blinking, just blinking doing its thing, and it was liberating. Blissful, awesome and at the same time as Shunryu Suzuki says "nothing special".

There's nothing special on how nature works, but at the same time is marvelous and mind blowing. Existence can be a nightmare or a beautiful dream. We don't choose it because there's no chooser. How can be "choose" if the "choosing" is done by "thoughts", thoughts that are just that. Thoughts appearing. We can't choose, we only can live, or better said "be lived" by reality.

There's no problems there, nothing to be solved, everything is perfect. Even the most outrageous acts are perfect, that's what is needed to expand consciousness, there's nothing we can do. No resistance, just let consciousness do whatever is needed to do. Because if something is done from that place, it will be perfect as everything it is. So we will be doing by no-doing.

Everything is under control, so "we" don't need to do nothing from the place of "identity". We have to go to the place of no resistance and acceptance of what is.

 

 

[Natasha]

@abrakamowse Beautifully said 

[abrakamowse]

Thanks @Natasha

[abrakamowse]

 

[abrakamowse]

I took a selfie today...

 

[abrakamowse]

There was a time when I was teenager that I was like having doubts about "God"

And I decided to become Atheist

I decided there was no God

But I wasn't sure about that because I had the idea that there should be something or some "happening" who or which made everything appear

So I decided that I couldn't have a way to know that, so I heard that some people were agnostic, that meant that they think that the idea of God is beyond our understanding, so they don't take a position. They don't believe but they don't "not believe" either. They say it's beyond comprehension, so better not think about it.

So I decided that I was agnostic, and I was agnostic for a long time.

Alan Watts likes a lot to talk about the origin of words

So he explained that long time ago there was a Persian priest called Dionysius the Areopagite.

 
And this guy wrote that we can reach God by Agnosis

The word Gnosis means Knowledge in greek (I think)

So A-Gnosis is the negation of knowledge

So me, by being Agnostic in fact , was denying knowledge without "me" being aware of it Lol

:-P

Words meaning are distorted by our reality. Agnosis or Agnostic doesn't mean what most people thinks it means.

[abrakamowse]

“The fact that man produces a concept “I” besides the totality of his mental and emotional experiences or perceptions does not prove that there must be any specific existence behind such a concept. We are succumbing to illusions produced by our self-created language, without reaching a better understanding of anything.”    Einstein