Finding the self - specifically about the vid The Ultimate Model Of Human Knowledge

[Neo]

Finding the self - specifically about the vid The Ultimate Model Of Human Knowledge

 

Heeeey, Hello all.

Firstly I would like to say what a great video it is, "The Ultimate Model Of Human Knowledge". I've watched this video 3 times in the last week and need to see it again.

If anyone hasn't seen it, it is along the lines of the Enlightenment videos but something about his one struck a chord right through me. It maybe that it brought some other ideas I had together I had learnt from the other videos before it.

It's funny that if you listen to it, Leo says, "at the end of the day it's just another **** world view", but then in the write up after declares that it is in fact *not* another world view.

Are you, Leo, in fact saying this is a short cut to enlightenment or are you saying that there is something else even more profound than enlightenment itself? (hard to believe after telling us it takes 100,000 hours to reach enlightenment, but there seems to be something else coming through in your words.)

So... about dissolving the self. First you need to find your "self". In another video Leo mentioned the mind is like a canvass onto which thoughts appear and in this video he likens it similarly to an amoeba like thing with beliefs spread around on it (klein's model of beliefs). I'm trying to find this self but I realise that words can't find it nor thoughts themselves. Does even mental imagery possess substance that prevents ultimately the dissolution of the mind? In fact these things may be counter productive. So I might have found the file (?), trying to use it too hard fails everytime. In my mind I see it as a key that needs to slip through another dimension and finding it seems so difficult.

Just a few thoughts of mine.

 

Edited February 7, 2016 by Neo

[denselayman]

does it counts as achieving enlightment when one has dealt with all past trauma and resolved most bad habits, comortably managing few remaining whilst having life all together, making sense, having purpose, is very enjoyable and all new/bad experience can be solved with small or moderate effort as well as plenty of new fields to improve in so that life does not get boring?

[Neo]

That certainly sounds like the kind of thing most good people aspire to. When I talk about enlightenment, I'm trying to open a door that not many people even know is there and on the other side is just light. (also known as truth)

[exaviusx]

hoi fellow self actualizers,

firstly to answer the question of how to find out what is your 'self': awareness. watch leos vidoe about awareness, it's relatively new, but eye-opening!

secondly when you 'become' enlightened, you know it... that's what I understand from what i've read/ heared. It must be soooo obvious, that a blind person would 'see' it ;D so basically you asking if you're enlightened, means you're probably not...

 

wish you all the best

[Neo]

Quote

 

Well thank you. If anyone had any specific thoughts on the video I mentioned that would be great.

[Walter B]

4 hours ago, Neo said:

6 hours ago, Neo said:

That certainly sounds like the kind of thing most good people aspire to. When I talk about enlightenment, I'm trying to open a door that not many people even know is there and on the other side is just light. (also known as truth)

Hmmm. Just knock. Or look inside without opening it. Some of the wild things may get loose if you leave the door ajar. Those critters can be hard to chase down if you can't settle them. 

That file surely exists on a non-searchable drive or in a notebook. Or better yet an IND. Remember who is on the side of right!

I'll drop my comments once I've watched the video.

 

Edited February 8, 2016 by Elemental
Content

[Truth]

4 hours ago, Neo said:

Well thank you. If anyone had any specific thoughts on the video I mentioned that would be great.

I've listened/watch this video about 8-9 times, along with his spiritual enlightenment  intro, FAQs 1,2 and 3, free will vs determinism, understanding awareness, if you seriously look closely its almost as if Leo is doing his very best pointing at this blind spot. Meditating and gaining knowledge and not distracting yourself with media and entertainment I found really helps.

[Leo Gura]

It's a shortcut to enlightenment in the sense that once you take it, you now start the 1,000 hour self-inquiry process. You can't short-cut self-inquiry.

I never said 100,000 hours. Only 1,000 hours. << That's not too bad if you think about. Only a couple years work. Less than high school. The problem is that people are so damn lazy and care about truth so little, that this 1,000 hours might as well be 1,000,000,000.

[jjer94]

51 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

It's a shortcut to enlightenment in the sense that once you take it, you now start the 1,000 hour self-inquiry process. You can't short-cut self-inquiry.

I never said 100,000 hours. Only 1,000 hours. << That's not too bad if you think about. Only a couple years work. Less than high school. The problem is that people are so damn lazy and care about truth so little, that this 1,000 hours might as well be 1,000,000,000.

You may want to be careful with setting a time schedule for enlightenment, Leo. Because what starts to happen, especially with self-inquiry, is that you begin to build illusory expectations. After enough consistent daily inquiry, you begin to build the expectation that you're going somewhere with it, that eventually (in 1000+ hours...) there will be some explosive flash of an experience and clarity will come shining down on you and you will be enlightened, boom, happily ever after. I'm not saying that's what you're doing; I'm just pointing it out to you and others as a warning. Hope that the self-inquiry will get you somewhere in the future is just another illusory trap you need to work through, because fundamentally, it's literally impossible to go somewhere when you're already there.

I disagree that you can't short-cut self-inquiry. You can, but it likely requires some monomania, a stark raving madness for the Truth. That's the state I was in this past summer after watching your How to Become Enlightened video. From there, it took a couple months of self-inquiry alongside digesting masses of reading material to see through the veil of self. When I saw through it, it didn't come as a flash of realization or a change in sense perceptions whatsoever. It was incredibly subtle and incredibly beautiful. Afterwards was plenty of laughing and crying. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it; non-dual awareness just began to stick naturally. And now, a few days ago, the search just plain ended after a final realization. I hadn't done any formally scheduled self-inquiry since that first realization in the summer.

My point is not to brag about how enlightened I am (or how stupidly contradictory that statement is) or how little time it took me or how superior I am to everyone else. My point is that there are no rules to becoming enlightened, no expectations, no requirements. Enlightenment is a pathless path, literally the most personal journey you can ever take. Sure, self-inquiry is a natural part of the process, but that can be done in many different ways, and it sure as heck doesn't have to take 1000 hours. After your first realization, you'll probably reconsider that statistic, because you'll be wondering how you didn't see it this whole time because of how dang simple Truth is. Now, the psychological clean-up/deprogramming process? That may take a while. All the best, Leo.

[Leo Gura]

There is no time constraint of course. You can get enlightened at any time and much sooner than 1000 hours. But I would rather give people a realistic expectation than a false hope. When you tell someone 1000 hours, they get a good idea of the seriousness of commitment required.

Besides, that first enlightenment experience only just the beginning. All the follow-up work will exceed 1000 hours easily and I want people to be prepared for that.

But for some folks enlightenment comes much sooner. Then again, for some folks it comes much later than 1000 hours.

[Neo]

OK, well, not getting too hung up on the number of hours, I might as well tell you what happened to me. Leo, in one of the early Enlightenment videos, you make the statement "You are not real" and somehow I was hypnotised, or allowed myself to be hypnotised by you for a few seconds (I may be easily put into this state maybe), so that my mind completely believed that there was no self. In that moment that only lasted 5 or 6 seconds I saw or felt light coming down from above and touching me in the most amazing way. I really didn't believe I had a self for that time, but the ego came running back. And unfortunately, although one of the posters above says that once you see it, you can never loose it, unfortunately I have lost it, and all I have is the memory of what happened. Maybe this will explain to you why I am hooked.

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, Neo said:

OK, well, not getting too hung up on the number of hours, I might as well tell you what happened to me. Leo, in one of the early Enlightenment videos, you make the statement "You are not real" and somehow I was hypnotised, or allowed myself to be hypnotised by you for a few seconds (I may be easily put into this state maybe), so that my mind completely believed that there was no self. In that moment that only lasted 5 or 6 seconds I saw or felt light coming down from above and touching me in the most amazing way. I really didn't believe I had a self for that time, but the ego came running back. And unfortunately, although one of the posters above says that once you see it, you can never loose it, unfortunately I have lost it, and all I have is the memory of what happened. Maybe this will explain to you why I am hooked.

That is SUPER common. Most people who have an enlightenment-like experience lose it after a few minutes, hours, or days. And then they spend years chase it. The ego illusion is VERY VERY VERY strong. In most cases it needs to be beaten down to a bloody-pulp. Hence the 1,000+ hours of brutal work.

Some people are lucky and they get a full-blow enlightenment experience that shatters the whole ego. But this is very rare.

What you experienced in those 5-6 seconds doesn't even sounds like an enlightenment experience. It's just a heightened state of awareness. That's cool. But you ain't seen nothing yet. All the coolest shit still lies ahead for you.

A real enlightenment experience will blow your whole mind. But even then, you're very likely to lose it, requiring deeper work. Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, enlightenment is not a simple black & white state. It's a very nuanced and messy business with many facets and edge-cases. Hence why people are so confused about it and why so many misconceptions exist about it. Even enlightened masters disagree.

[Walter B]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That is SUPER common. Most people who have an enlightenment-like experience lose it after a few minutes, hours, or days. And then they spend years chase it. The ego illusion is VERY VERY VERY strong. In most cases it needs to be beaten down to a bloody-pulp. Hence the 1,000+ hours of brutal work.

Some people are lucky and they get a full-blow enlightenment experience that shatters the whole ego. But this is very rare.

What you experienced in those 5-6 seconds doesn't even sounds like an enlightenment experience. It's just a heightened state of awareness. That's cool. But you ain't seen nothing yet. All the coolest shit still lies ahead for you.

A real enlightenment experience will blow your whole mind. But even then, you're very likely to lose it, requiring deeper work. Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, enlightenment is not a simple black & white state. It's a very nuanced and messy business with many facets and edge-cases. Hence why people are so confused about it and why so many misconceptions exist about it. Even enlightened masters disagree.

Leo, what are your thoughts on the Ego being lessened nearly to completion during this time?  Not necessarily because of the quest, but circumstances yielding all the same.  Ego gone.  Then, in attempts to have interactions with people who you once felt as friends and one desired to give some trust to, one realizes they don't seem to like one without all that ego.  It's like their ego is bruised because someone else no longer carries theirs.  Could be the way one dresses or wears their hair or the way they speak or the path they pursue or the food they eat, but those people who used to be supportive and friendly become mortal enemies of sorts.  It's like they want to change one back to who they were, naive, ignorant, manipulable, serving other's purpose rather than one's own.  With complete disregard of one's actual circumstance.  And some of these small minded people can be very adamant in demanding servitude and respect when in reality, the one who has realized who've they've been their entire lives through their own growth path finds it hard to even find things to respect about these people let alone to serve them or follow them or even to share a meal with them.

And the general public or perhaps just a few that appear to have mind influence can be so thick skulled that they just keep on and on and on.  They aren't brave enough to even voice their thoughts.  And perhaps these are the people that are, in their own mind, trying to take something that is not theirs, from someone else.  I guess that's the story of life though.  And the fact that "they think" they move around in the wind doing selfish and destructive things simply speaks for their character and perhaps I've just remembered the answer that I came to last time I thought more than a ****** minute about it. 

 

But hey, friends and foes are matters of perspectives.  And sometimes those can be very deceiving.  For some of us, friend or foe changes in an instant.  Guess that lack of consistency is a better mark of character than the means by which one behaves as "friend or foe".  The "way of the wind" is a great book btw.

Edited February 8, 2016 by Elemental
rhetoric and grammer

[Walter B]

15 hours ago, Elemental said:

 

The latest video is quite fascinating.  I'm only at the 36 min mark, but I must say that maybe studying quantum mechanics for many years before awareness has a great deal to do with things.  And the blank spot was indeed a blank spot.  E is "measured" to explain the link from particle to wave in versatile units of energy.  It works for a bowling ball just the same as for an electron.  That's really quite amazing when you realize one is so large that its motions can be described with classical mechanics and the electron cannot due to its size relative to the length of the "waves" of energy.  The uncertainty becomes too great when these sizes are not significantly different.

What would be really neat is to hear from someone who works with subatomic theory about the indications of the differences in particle make up of an electron or other atomic particle vs. the photon.  The photon is it's own subatomic particle you see.  It is not made up of combinations of quarks, bosons, mesons, and things I have not studied enough to know if my context in this sentence is defined accordingly (classifications and all).  But, I do know that last time I looked we had not isolated a graviton and gravity surely seems like a truth in our reality of this reference frame, this distance above the center of the earth, which is also in the gravitational fields of the other planetary bodies in our near vicinity.  Now, we also know or have been taught we have mass.  And, well the large hadron collider has done lots of work on the Higgs boson.  Which, if I recall is one of 4 SA-particles that must fit together theoretically to produce mass.  Pretty neat stuff.  It appeared that there were magnetic fields coming together like a puzzle to make a whole.  Well, particles have mass, and photons are their own singular subatomic species (by our classifications) so, perhaps it seemed best (back during the emergence of quantum mechanics) to just measure the energy of the electromagnetic wave that resulted when the electron gun fired electrons at a surface (or it was heated up to release photons) rather than trying to explain the link (we're still doing that part).  But, hey scientists are getting there!  But that still doesn't violate any spiritual belief in my opinion.  Even if they categorize it all, remember it'll never be perfect.  It can't be.  The instruments themselves have uncertainty.  And to control or manipulate it all to induce a Godly effect would require perfection that is unattainable.  That was all I needed to know a long time ago.

Edited February 8, 2016 by Elemental
rhetoric and grammer

[Guest]

Enlightenment - like casting a spot light on something and providing a clearer or totally different perspective of it.  

There is a story in eastern literature that relates to this concept of enlightenment.  The story tells of a traveller who comes to a well to get some water.   It was twilight, a difficult lighting situation in which to see anything clearly.  This difficult lighting condition often plays havoc with optical impressions.   When the traveller approached the well he saw a coiled snake near the well by the bucket.  He jumps back in fear, bellowing a sound of fright.  A wise man, approaching the well from the other side hears the screech and asks what the trouble is.  The frightened traveller points to the dimly lit spot by the well and warns of the cobra by the bucket.  The wise man instantly sees the reason for the man's fear.   He steps forward, bends over and lifts up the water bucket rope that lay coiled on the ground.  Seeing the object of his fear in a better light, the traveller now sees that it is not a snake after all.

Enlightenment concerns knowledge that is revealed in the light of truth.   This is NOT knowledge of the intellect, but knowledge in the sense of noumenon. 

Noumenon - (in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.

 

Edited February 8, 2016 by walt