Thought-provoking conclusions after 30+ years of heavy meditation

[Enlightenment]

Kenneth Folk after twenty years of training in the Burmese Theravada Buddhist tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, including three years of intensive silent retreat in monasteries in Asia and the U.S., he began to spread his own findings, successfully stripping away religious dogma to render meditation accessible to modern practitioners.

I know some things here goes contrary to what is believed to be true by the majority of people here. However, I find this perspective thought-provoking as well as I believe there's a great value to search not only for things that prove your already existing beliefs. Read with an open mind.

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Training Attention
"Being aware of experience, and then becoming conscious that you are aware of experience" describes the process of systematically training attention. It's useful to think of this as a series of steps. It might look like this.

1. Embedded in experience. You're a cat on the front lawn, staring at a gopher hole, waiting for the gopher to emerge. You have no self-awareness. You aren't even conscious that you are seeing. You are fully "in it."

2. Able to name the object. You can play the children's game "I Spy with my Little Eye." If someone were to ask you what you are looking at, you would say, "A gopher hole."

3. Able to form a concept around the activity. If someone were to ask you what you are doing, you would say that you are waiting for the gopher to emerge, and that you understand that gophers live in holes.

4. Able to observe the experience as experience. This is the beginning of vipassana. If someone asked you about your direct experience, you would answer "seeing." You understand that all seeing has something in common, irrespective of what is seen. Seeing a gopher hole has a lot in common with seeing a house or another cat.

5. Able to conceptually separate object from apparent subject. If you are asked who is seeing, you would say "I am seeing."

6. Able to attend to the apparent "I". You can turn attention toward the one who seems to be seeing. You can even become absorbed in this experience of witnessing and reify it as "the witness."

7. Able to deconstruct the witnessing state by looking directly at its component parts. At this point, "the witness" no longer seems to be "I"; it is revealed as just another state.

8. More of the same, at various levels of subtlety, always moving from identification to conceptualization to investigation to deconstruction and around again.

We could add more sub-steps and detail, but this shows the trajectory from absorption/emeddedness toward seeing experience as experience. We could also extend the steps to become aware of what appears at first to be a ground state, aka Primordial Awareness, within which everything else arises, and then to investigate the component parts of the apparent ground state to see that our experience of the supposed ground state is just another experience.

To summarize, the process of waking up involves becoming aware of experience, then becoming aware that there seems to be someone having the experience, and then becoming aware that this apparent someone is also an experience. We aren't able to find a personal nugget of knowing or an impersonal field of knowing that can stand apart from experience and evaluate it from on high. No experience is more real than any other, or prior to any other; there is only experience, always moving, referring back to no one.

This does not mean that the momentarily arising sense that "this is happening to me" stops arising. It continues to arise, which is good, because this sense of provisional identity is fundamental to functioning in the world. However, this oft-arising sense of I is seen as just another experience. It is no longer seen as the one immutable lens through which all other experience must be filtered.

Experience as Process
By "the ability to see experience as process" I mean seeing in real time that everything within experience is moving, including the oft-arising sense that "this is happening to me." Seen this way, there doesn't seem to be any abiding nugget of consciousness that could be considered "I". There also doesn't appear to be any abiding field of consciousness within which all of this is happening. Every aspect of experience has exactly the same status as any other; it's just what is happening. The perception of an apparent field of awareness is also just what is happening. The absolute, self-validating conviction that this apparent field of awareness is the Truth of the Universe is itself just something that is happening. There is no place to hang your hat.

I like to think of a dust devil in an open field. It spins around, kicks up dust, lasts as long as it lasts, and then peters out. It arises according to conditions in the environment, and passes away when the conditions that created it no longer exist. Each of us is a dust devil. We spin around, interact with other dust devils, make some noise, and then stop spinning, either suddenly or gradually. In the same way that we don't assume there is anyone inside a dust devil making it go, we don't have to assume there is anyone "in here," inside of our own whirling experience. The sense that "this is happening to me" is just another gust of wind. The disappointment that may arise on noticing that "I" am much less substantial (and therefore much less important) than I had hoped, is itself a gust of wind.

Absence of an Abiding Phenomenon
Yes, on at least two occasions, for periods lasting several years at a time, I thought I'd found something static, constant, or perhaps abiding, within experience. The first was what seemed to be a kind of witnessing consciousness that could be found within any moment of experience irrespective of whatever else was going on. I was able to cultivate this into a recognizable and reproducible state that I thought of as the witness. I also believed that this witnessing consciousness was there in the background even when there was no conscious recognition of it. The witness, when cultivated as a state, was compelling because it felt like an upgrade from my default identity as Kenneth; from the point of view of the witness, there wasn't any concern for whether Kenneth lived or died. There was very little sense of time; it felt like riding the razor's edge of now, without reference to past or future.

The second candidate for an abiding phenomenon was a subtle, exquisite, diffuse presence that seemed to underlie and pervade or contain all experience but had no location or individual identity. From this point of view, which I thought of as primordial awareness, "I" seemed to disappear and merge within the totality of experience. This was, subjectively speaking, the best of all; it felt wonderful to meld into the universal consciousness and cease to exist as a separate entity.

In both cases, as I continued to cultivate, explore, and investigate the experiences, the orientation toward them changed. It became apparent that as wonderful and valuable as these experiences were, they were still experiences. For "experience," I'm using a simple, common-sense definition: if it can be remembered, it was an experience. If there was consciousness during it, it was an experience. Notice that this definition of experience doesn't posit an "I" to have the experience; that's a separate question.

As the experiences of the witness and primordial awareness were integrated through the years, it became increasingly difficult to think of them as special, or to believe that they were more real, more valid, or more ontologically significant than an itch, a sound, or a thought. This was simultaneously devastating and liberating. I could no longer privilege even the loftiest of phenomena as the "right" way to be or the "truth." The common habit of spiritual teachers to speak of Reality as though it had a capital "R" no longer made sense to me.

Here is my current working model: all experience has exactly the same ontological status as any other. In other words, there is no reason to believe that any experience, however subtle, exquisite, or profound, gives one special knowledge or insight into the ultimate nature of the universe. As humbling and discouraging as this may sound, it turns out to be a great relief, once integrated. It's terrible when Santa Claus dies, but at least you don't have to drag him around anymore. Now, having grieved extensively the death of my sacred states, I am much more likely to be delighted than discouraged upon noticing that there is nothing in this or any other world that we can be sure of.

From this point of view, experiences of the "witness" or "merger with the cosmos" can still be valued as beautiful and enriching, and one can enjoy them for their own sake.

An Empowering Understanding
Perhaps the most empowering understanding about the practice that leads to awakening is that it doesn't matter what is happening as long as you know it's happening as it's happening. So much freedom flows from there. Even if what is happening is absolutely dreadful, it can be objectified, noticed, lit up by consciousness, named, and noted. And that's all you have to do. About the time you see it clearly, it's gone, replaced by something else. Which can also be noted.

In '93, I was living and meditating in a monastery in Rangoon, Burma. One day, at interview, one of the yogis asked the monk teacher whether we should be doing "letting go" practice. The monk said, "You don't have to let go of anything. Just see it clearly. It will go away by itself."

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

If you pay careful attention to your experience … there are no hindrances in the realm of vipassana properly understood; the moment you objectify the supposed hindrance, it becomes fuel for your awakening.

Letting Go
I was heartbroken to realize that many of my most cherished hopes and beliefs about enlightenment were childish fantasies. On the other hand, there has been great relief and freedom each time a layer of calcified beliefs has dropped away. This process has been both much better and much worse than I imagined. I never expected to be so disappointingly flawed and human after more than 30 years of diligent practice... and to see, after spending significant amounts of time with some of the greatest Buddhist teachers of our time, that they too were just people. That awakening/enlightenment does not, will not, and could not make one anything other than an ordinary human being with strengths and weakness, hopes and fears, blind spots and great insights, and subject to old age, sickness, and death, just as the Buddha pointed out so many centuries ago.

On the other hand, I could never have imagined how very liberating it would feel to give myself permission to be ordinary. Seems obvious, from where I stand at the moment, that human life is a mixed bag. And that it's just what it is... joyful when it's joyful, sucky when it's sucky. But for many years, I was heavily invested in my projections about the way things ought to be, and I suffered a great deal, thinking I was doing it wrong. Overall, it feels so much better to be free than to enslaved by one's own fantasies of perfection-in-the-future.

We can only really be free when we also cut our spiritual heroes loose, showing them the compassion of accepting their humanity, whether they are living or dead, and forgiving them their own delusions and pretensions in cases where they claimed to be something they were not. They were/are only human, after all.

Most interesting, currently, is to see if I can notice what I'm hanging onto now. Hmmm...

The Pure Awareness Concept
Now, access the nondual experience and hang out there a little bit. Then come back to the dualistic experience and notice that some whiff of the Pure Awareness experience is still present in ordinary experience, as I believe you reported a little earlier.

Consider each aspect of experience carefully. Be patient, this may take some time. What is actually happening? Are there mental events? Are there physical sensations? Look at the emotions, the "spacious, clear, unmoving" qualities you reported earlier, and the "subtle current of easeful joy and contentment." Can these be seen as mental and physical phenomena, however subtle and exquisite? What about the self-validating quality of this experience? Is this not, in itself, another experience?

Is it possible to consider that this Pure Awareness experience, while valuable and wonderful, exquisitely subtle and profound... is just an experience? Other than the subjective quality of self-validation, which is itself an experience, what could be the basis for concluding that the nondual or Pure Awareness experience is more real or more true than any other experience?

How do you feel as you consider this possibility? When I first started to question Pure Awareness in my own practice, I felt traumatized. I wanted to fight about it, insist that anyone who dared to question the ultimate nature of Pure Awareness simply hadn't seen it yet. I told myself that I pitied the poor fools, and that someday, if they practiced enough, their eyes might be opened to the Truth that was so obvious to me.

But there was something about my own reaction that was a red flag for me. The very fact that I felt I needed to defend this Ultimate Reality... was kind of weird. I am a very slow learner. It took me several years, and a lot of false starts before I could really question my own entrenched belief that I had plumbed the depths of Reality, and could access and merge with it at will. It was devastating and humiliating. But I let it in. I grieved the loss of my own projection... and eventually, I started to feel lighter. I didn't have this concept of Ultimate Reality to carry around anymore. What a relief! I could finally just let experience be experience, without needing it to be special, ultimate, or nondual, or to even know what it was or what it stood for. And I finally understood what the sages meant when they said that whatever you think is IT... isn't it.

Experience and Awareness
I'm suggesting that there is no experience of awareness. Awareness is always inferred. The experiences you are calling "awareness," however subtle, exquisite, profound, and self-validating, are just experiences, with no more or less claim to Ultimate Reality than an itch, or a thought, or gas pain. I'm suggesting that neither you, nor I, nor anyone else, past or present has ever perceived or apperceived, quasi-perceived, or otherwise-perceived awareness, either personally or impersonally. What people (understandably) mislabel "Awareness" is, in fact, a mental construct, a composite of physical and mental phenomena. I'm suggesting that the next step for you (and anyone who is talking about Awareness) is to grieve the death of your projection. With this understanding, this process of awakening takes a sharp turn into territory we never bargained for and couldn't have anticipated in advance. This is why it's hard, and rare. Most people will not take this step. They will park themselves in their mental constructs, surround themselves with people who believe the same thing, and fail to move beyond their current understanding.

I'm not questioning inference that there is awareness. It is an excellent inference and part of a good working model of the world. I'm asking you to see that it IS an inference. You have no direct experience of awareness. Awareness is always inferred.

Understanding my point depends on first making the distinction between your simple, direct experience, on the one hand, and what you think about your experience, on the other.

If you carefully examine your experience in this moment, you will not find awareness. You will find seeing, hearing, tasting, touching/feeling, smelling, tasting, and mental phenomena. There is nothing in experience except experience, irrespective of whether it seems to be happening to an "I" or not.

All of your conclusions about the nature of experience are thoughts. They may be accurate. They may not. We may never know in some cases. The important thing is to be able to see that they are thoughts. If you can meet me at this basic level of understanding the difference between 1) experience, and 2) thoughts about experience, you're halfway to understanding my main point, which is that there is no such thing on Earth as the experience of awareness. Whether there IS anything that could be reasonably called awareness is another question; we don't have to solve it here, and in fact it's a matter of hot debate among some philosophers.

Awakening doesn't depend on getting philosophy right. It's more about being ruthlessly honest with yourself about what is being experienced in the moment, and resisting the temptation to filter raw experience through our beliefs about what should be happening. If you think you already understand what is going on, it's very difficult to see clearly. For awakening, seeing clearly is everything.

About Synesthesia and Changes in Visual Perception
Yes, this happens to a lot of meditators, myself included. There is often a low-level synesthesia when the mind is very quiet. Sounds, for example, are experienced as both sounds and physical sensations, and sometimes colors or shapes. Visuals can be felt in the body. Mental phenomena and mind states can have a characteristic inner sound (or inner silence). As you say, this is variable, depends on conditions, and is trainable. I would add that it is reproducible, within limits, by which I mean that one can get better at it, but mastery will never be absolute.

Changes in visual perception similar to those you describe, e.g., richer colors, brightness, things appearing two-dimensional or hyper-three-dimensional, are also very common occurrences among meditators. All of this is normal, and has been reported by many meditators.

These are interesting and valuable experiences, and worth cultivating for their own sake. They can also be investigated from a vipassana point of view. I recommend that you do both.

About Rebirth
I don't believe in rebirth, even though I've had experiences that seemed at the time to be vivid recollections of past lives. This is related to my basic assumption that subjective experience does not equal direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality, or as in this case, the mechanical functioning of the universe.

Once, while on retreat in a monastery in Burma, I spent a couple of days calling up memories of past lives. It worked, and I recalled several episodes in great detail, along with metadata about the lives overall. Earlier, as a teenager, I underwent hypnosis and past life regression, and had a similar recollection of what seemed to be a past life. This happened at a party and was all in good fun.

Also, I sometimes have vivid experiences of visiting other realms and interacting with the beings I find there. In Buddhist terms, these might be called devas. They might seem as real as the people I interact with in normal waking life, and they might seem intelligent, self-aware, and aware of me as not only a self-aware being, but also a visitor or alien in their world. If I believed that my subjective experience alone was an unfiltered lens into Truth, I would assume that these devas exist, similar to the way I think my family and community exist, and that when I am not there visiting or observing them, they go on about their lives just as any Earthbound human would do.

But I do not assume that. Rather, I assume that this human organism can have all kinds of experiences that are completely made up by this human organism. In fact, this happens several nights a week in the form of vivid dreams. Just as most of us would not assume that our dreams are windows into another reality, but rather ephemeral events confined to our own minds, I don't assume that devas exist outside of our dreams or visions.

In this same way, I don't assume that my vivid experiences of past life memories are actual memories of real events involving other historically existing humans. In the absence of this assumption, and in the absence of independently verifiable evidence, I can only say I'm highly skeptical about rebirth. Rebirth, it seems to me, is a religious belief with no more or less validity than the belief that a partisan God created the Earth in seven days and then spent centuries punishing people for not believing in him. Both notions seem equally unlikely from where I sit.

Most importantly, I don't know; which is in no way the same as saying that anything is as likely to be true as anything else. My default response to unverifiable, unsupported, and unfalsifiable claims is to assume they are untrue. I would recommend this approach to anyone, as I believe it stands at the very foundations of sanity, intellectual honesty, and the ability to communicate clearly with others.

About Nibbana
First, nobody knows what the Buddha's teaching was. We have only interpretation … It's tempting to imagine that there is one correct way to understand the Buddha's teachings, and that all other interpretations are fringy. This is wrong, of course. There has never been consensus about what the Buddha meant, throughout the history of Buddhism. This means that even today's popular Western view of nibbana as eternal bliss-out, which is highly influenced by New Age thought and Christian images of heaven, should not be taken as orthodoxy. Gasp. emoticon

So, while is correct that my teachings are mine and not the Buddha's, it's essential that we understand at every step of the way that everything that has ever been written about the Buddha in the history of Buddhism was written by someone other than the Buddha. Even this is too sloppy, because we must also admit that we aren't absolutely sure there ever was a historical Buddha. If we can be this honest in the foundations of the discussion, we can skip over a lot of pointless arguments. Suffice to say that I think there is value in assuming that there was a Buddha and that the early Buddhist texts were, at least sometimes, fairly representative of his thought. This gives us some sound conceptual frameworks with which to understand our experience, and some effective techniques to try out for ourselves.

I love to bring this word "oblivion" into the discussion because it so clearly galvanizes our thought around what nibbana might be. Among my Burmese and American teachers in the Mahasi tradition of Buddhism, there was very little controversy about the understanding that nibbana is the complete and utter lack of experience. Take a moment to let that settle.

Nibbana, in the Mahasi tradition, as it was explained to me, is not a special kind of experience. It's not an impersonal background glow of awareness into which we will merge. It's not pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It is simply the end. While that may feel very scary to those of us steeped in the Christian ideal of eternal life, try to think of what it might have meant for the Buddha, to whom life was an almost unendurable parade of sorrows; since the Buddha believed that the default case was an infinite chain of rebirth across all the realms, including the hell realms, animal realms, hungry ghost realms, and jealous god realms, it would have been great comfort indeed to believe that it might finally come to an end.

Viewed from the point of view of the person to whom it happens, then, nibbana is indeed extinction. And that is a very welcome situation if you believe the alternative is unsatisfactoriness punctuated by hell. You don't get to enjoy nibbana. Nobody does. But the cultural lens into which the idea arose made the idea of the utter, complete, and permanent end of experience a cause for celebration. Nibbana is peace.

Now let's consider oblivion. Notice that the description, from the point of view of the person to whom it happens is exactly the same as nibbana: the end of experience. In oblivion, there isn't anyone there to suffer. Nonetheless, viewed through the cultural lens of someone who grew up in a Christian/New Age culture, the very idea of it is horrifying. Imagine the opportunity cost; surely almost any kind of life is better than none at all. And if there is a chance of melding into the Universal Consciousness, leaving behind all traces of "me" while still being able to feel the bliss... how wonderful that would be, and how cruel and pointless it seems to contemplate a world in which my essence cannot take part.

Two words. Nibbana and oblivion. Both look exactly the same to the person to whom they happen, which is to say they don't look any way at all; there is no one there, either to celebrate or to complain. And yet the words themselves evoke such different responses.

This cultural revulsion toward the idea of oblivion is so entrenched that even some senior Western Buddhist teachers won't go near it. I recently heard an interview in which a Western teacher described nibbana by saying there is no experience. "But it's not nothing!" he quickly insisted, and went on to try to explain using the simile of the zero in mathematics. It made no sense. For me, it seems pointless to speculate about the ontological significance of nibbana if it is the end of experience for the person who enters it. At the same time, I do acknowledge that some people are comforted by the idea that even though they won't be there to appreciate it, nibbana is warm, welcoming, and enduring. In any case, there is no need for us to know the answer to what the Buddha meant by nibbana. I don't think we can know. My hope is that we can see our beliefs as beliefs, and not put too much stock in them either way.

Please note that I have not claimed that Mahasi Sayadaw, or indeed anyone, taught that nibbana = oblivion. In fact, I'm not even claiming that myself. I'm not interested in ontological speculation.

I'm talking about the phenomenology of direct experience. What I am saying is that from the point of view of the person to whom it happens, nibbana and oblivion are indistinguishable, an observation that to me is so blindingly obvious that I'm surprised anyone is willing to dispute it, since to believe otherwise is to imagine that you or some disembodied awareness that used to be you is going to be sitting around in nibbana enjoying it.

It's also important to note that the Mahasi tradition teaches us to systematically develop the ability to access nibbana, aka cessation or fruition. Many people, including myself, have trained in this way, and their reports are remarkably consistent; there is no experience in nibbana. You simply lose consciousness. I realize this isn't very romantic, and I apologize for being such a bubble-burster, but there it is. If Buddhists who have had this experience are teaching that nibbana is "not nothing," it is presumably because (1) the fact that one feels really good upon emerging from this unconscious state leads them to infer that something wonderful must have been going on there or (2) to admit to students that nibbana is the lack of experience is to risk scaring off the students. As you can see, I'm not very worried about scaring off students, and prefer to tell it as I see it, whatever the outcome. As for the inference that something wonderful must have been going on in nibbana since you feel so good when you emerge from it, I would point out that after you die, assuming you have entered nibbana, there will be no emerging. There will just be the lack of experience. Good news, bad news, who knows?

The reason this matters is that if you are a New Age Buddhist who has put all her/his eggs in the nibbana-as-cosmic-blissout basket, or a confused Buddhist who doesn't understand that Hinduism and early Buddhism are diametrically opposed on the question of what happens to meditative adepts after death, you have a right to be told that the foundations of your belief system are based on a misconception. The very fact that some people on this thread are shocked or outraged by what I'm saying is evidence that it needs to be said. The real outrage is that you haven't heard this before.

 

[Enlightenment]

Sorry for formatting error, I don't know how to fix it

[ajasatya]

6 minutes ago, Enlightenment said:

Sorry for formatting error, I don't know how to fix it

I fixed it for you. Thanks for the text. It's amazing.

[Enlightenment]

4 minutes ago, ajasatya said:

I fixed it for you.

[zeroISinfinity]

@Mikael89 This text you Just have read is you. 

Drop the mind already. For real Just drop it. 

Yes there is "oblivion" as you call it and it your Truest "state" all the rest are in a sense charade.

 

[ajasatya]

C'mon guys... take what serves you. That's the perspective of a very experienced seeker.

[outlandish]

Thank you for posting that @Enlightenment

Hello person reading this post. Scroll up and read every word in there, slowly and carefully. It's the most important thing you'll read today.

[zeroISinfinity]

19 minutes ago, Mikael89 said:

With oblivion I meant total eternal death.

Do you mean the same thing?

There is no total eternal death. 

What I meant is something what you really are when "experience" collapses. 

There is no experience, time, space, self, world, others, physicality and so on. Hard to grasp. 

What you love the most has to evaporate so God can be revealed. 

What Adam really should stop doing is eating those apples from tree of knowledge once and for all. 

Hope you get this. 

Edited June 28, 2019 by zeroISinfinity

[passerby]

lmao, so highly advanced Burmese buddhist meditation is basically going to sleep at will (with no dreams). Cool achievement wtf you wanna experience the oblivion during life if you gonna get to spend the rest of eternity in it in 30-50 years anyway? fucking weirdos, there I said it lol.

 

 

[Knock]

You know how you spend your days searching the internet for the 'Truth'?

This is it. This is the most profound thing I have ever read. Read every word of it.

Thank you for sharing@Enlightenment <3

[lostmedstudent]

Thank you for sharing!!!

i would love for Leo to see this and have his opinion about this txt! 

@Leo Gura

[peanutspathtotruth]

Wow... Thank you so much for sharing!

[Preetom]

Some very interesting points here. I may have believed all of it before. But now there are few objections.

1) Yes I agree that Awareness cannot ever be an experience itself. Most people who claim otherwise are all caught up in some subtle, mindnumbing states and calling it the ultimate awareness or god or whatever...until their bubbles pop.

But Awareness is not an inference or altogether absent either. The TV screen and movie analogy explains it well. The screen itself will never appear in the movie. A character in a movie can explore the whole movie universe and yet wont find the screen. Similarly Awareness will never appear as an object of experience.

But does that make the screen an inference or non-existent thing? No! Actually it is the screen that is the only reality and the movie is an inference, a superimposition, an abstraction of 'things' that are not even there at all.

Similarly, those who are caught up in phenomena or experience, fail to recognize that it is experience itself that is an inference or an abstraction; including a seemingly subjectless or I-less oneness, nondual experience. A nondual experience is like an image of screen on the real screen ? Basically an abstraction mimicking reality. Awareness is not inference or an abstraction. 

2) The very concept of "things are just happening" sounds very fishy to me nowadays. It immediately points how the observer hasn't still considered the nature of thoughts. 'Things' dont 'happen'. There is only thought which abstracts and infers that things are happening. I know sounds woo woo, but I cant deny what i am seeing everyday.

There is no 'happening', 'changing', 'flowing' without referring to thought-memory. This is what Ramana Maharshi meant when he said "the world is nothing but thoughts". 

3) Which brings up the topic of Nibbana or total extinction. Its not as if a 'real' world is dangling out there and upon nibbana we will be in some infinitely dark oblivion. 

It simply refers to the fact that the very idea of a world along with all its features like time, space, location, causality are all thoughts or abstrations about things that are really not there in the first place.

Like how in quantum mechanics, the notion of particles with location is an abstraction; things that are really not there; and yet all of our conventional reality is based on that abstraction. Same deal with language. All words are abstraction of 'things' that are really non existent. In other words, its all a very convincing, mutually reinforcing fiction.

"All pointers point to that which is not" - Nisargadatta Maharaj

Yes seeing like this; awareness, god, experience etc all are abstractions.

Nibbaba is the extinction of this abstraction, leaving reality as it is. Now what that is or seems like, cant be communicated through abstractions

 

Edited June 29, 2019 by Preetom

[Enlightenment]

 

 

1

9 hours ago, passerby said:

lmao, so highly advanced Burmese buddhist meditation is basically going to sleep at will (with no dreams). Cool achievement wtf you wanna experience the oblivion during life if you gonna get to spend the rest of eternity in it in 30-50 years anyway? fucking weirdos, there I said it lol.

Cool achievement but also very practical. Accessing oblivion at will when you have a strong pain is a superpower IMO

8 hours ago, Knock said:

You know how you spend your days searching the internet for the 'Truth'?

I'm really all over the place Actialised.org, Dharma overground, Youtube podcasts, Reddit (mainly The Mind Illuminated sub), Polish forums

[Sev]

I think @Leo Gura will disagree with this text a lot.

[outlandish]

@Enlightenment where was this originally posted?

[Enlightenment]

@outlandish

http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5660045
http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5664257

Part 2 of the Q&A with Kenneth

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5673089

Edited July 1, 2019 by Enlightenment

[SunnyNewDay]

Wow!

[AdamDiC]

This guy is woke.

You can tell he's sharing from experience. Awesome.

Vipassana is blessed.  And the fruition he talks about (void, oblivion) is really just an unconscious non-dual state. Similar to various samadhi states etc.

And for some reason when you come out of these states - usually near the end of a vipassana retreat, or not - you feel lighter, as if you've been slightly purified. It's a cool system by Mahasi Sayadaw

But this should'nt discount the hundreds of hours of noting meditation lol. SOOO much noting.