Seeing Enlightenment From A New Perspective

[cetus]

I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to say here so let's see how this goes. I'm seeing enlightenment in a bit of a different light as I woke this morning. I guess the big question that's always in the back of my head is "what exactly is enlightenment?" We as humans have evolved on this planet for millions of years. Our brains have the capacity to do many wonderful things like no other species on this planet. But along with that highly developed brain we also have a strong sense of self. We than ask ourselves "who am I". Where did I come from? What is my purpose? What happens to me when I die? Once these question are asked, the search for an answer begins. Religions try to answer all these age old questions by telling us there is a supreme being that creates, destroys, sees and judges all that is happing as an attempt to satisfy a question that most everyone has. So religion "fills in the blanks" so to speak. Any answer is better than no answer at all because people can than feel secure that the question is answered and they can rest their mind in that belief. So here is the question I woke with this morning. Is enlightenment a mental tool that is used, like a religion. But not to answer the big questions, but to just silence them because there are no answers and the questions are really the only cause for the search in the first place? I'm seeing humans as just another aspect of this universe. The same as any other living organism. But one that has evolved just enough to ask the deadly questions that there are no answers too.

Than there is the next part of that process when we want to believe we have the answer that satisfies the question of 'What am I". Our brains come up with answers like -Infinity, the absolute, truth, nothingness, God, bliss ect, ect. We than feel the need to experience whatever "that" is. Like we want absolute proof of it. Aren't we creating another dream within a dream within that sense of self that comes with having a higher brain function? Isn't all this just the mind doing all this within itself? Every single bit of it? Is realizing this simple fact enlightenment? Is enlightenment just fix for a glitch in the operating system?

A week or so ago, somebody replied to a post saying "Now that Leo has reached Infinity"___ _ _ _ _  .  Something about that innocent little statement really made me re-evaluate everything that is happing.   Who reached What?     What drives this search in the first place?  Is it all just an anomaly of higher brain function?  What is really happing?  *I would greatly appreciate anyone's input on all this. What do think?

 

[123456789]

Who's asking those questions? 

 

[cetus]

36 minutes ago, Mr Lenny said:

Who's asking those questions? 

 

@Mr Lenny A glitch in the operating system of higher brain function? *Maybe we just haven't worked all the bugs out yet.

Edited October 31, 2016 by cetus56

[123456789]

@cetus56 Concept, concept, concept....

[cetus]

14 minutes ago, Mr Lenny said:

@cetus56 Concept, concept, concept....

What is not a concept?  Even having no concept is a concept.

[123456789]

@cetus56 Haha!

[cetus]

56 minutes ago, Mr Lenny said:

@cetus56 Concept, concept, concept....

Just to make it clear, what I'm asking is, is "enlightenment" as we call it, this evolving brain doing a search within it's own operating system to find and repair a glitch that has been inherent within it since it's first development? Humans have a higher brain function but it still has a long way to go. With that higher brain function there has always been one glitch, sense of self. Is enlightenment just another process of evolution through which this continuously evolving brain is developing?

Edited October 31, 2016 by cetus56

[Prabhaker]

1 hour ago, cetus56 said:

What drives this search in the first place?

You can go on searching and you will find many things in life, but nothing is going to satisfy. Just a moment´s illusion when a desire is fulfilled. For a moment you feel good, but only for a moment. As one desire disappears, ten desires arise in its place. Again the whole turmoil starts, again the whole trip. And it is a non-ending process. Only with finding your center does that process stop, that wheel moves no more. 

Everything else in life is promises, but only false promises. The goods are never delivered. Money promises that if you have it you will be helped. But people go on becoming richer and richer and happiness never arrives. It is always there like the horizon - very elusive. Relationships give you the idea that everything will be good now and you will live in happiness forever, but it never happens.

Only with finding your center, satisfaction happens.

[Prabhaker]

3 minutes ago, cetus56 said:

Is enlightenment just another process of evolution through which this continuously evolving brain is growing?

Enlightenment is not of the mind.

Enlightenment is freedom from the mind; it is transcending mind, it is going beyond mind. 

Enlightenment has nothing to do with mind; it has something to do with awareness of the mind.

Awareness is simply disidentification with the mind; mind is left behind as a mechanism. The moment the mind is completely left behind and there is only pure awareness, just a luminosity, it is enlightenment.

[cetus]

@Prabhaker  Yes, I totally agree. I was putting my question into a general form just  as your reply was coming in. Take a look at the question that I was summarizing. What do you think. Is enlightenment just the human brain in development? Fixing it's  glitches?

[Prabhaker]

5 minutes ago, cetus56 said:

What do you think. Is enlightenment just the human brain in development? Fixing it's  glitches?

MIND IS A DISEASE. This is a basic truth the East mysticism has discovered. The West says mind can become ill, can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this: the mind can be healthy or ill. But the East says mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. No psychiatry will help; at the most you can make it normally ill. 

End of the mind is enlightenment.

 

[cetus]

@Prabhaker I'm looking at what exactly enlightenment means and what it's end result is. Not as a romantic idea of something to attain. But more in what actually is happening to someone who drops that sense of self. This seems to me to be a natural developmental stage of the workings of the brain =mind/self. 

[Telepresent]

6 minutes ago, cetus56 said:

@Prabhaker  Yes, I totally agree. I was putting my question into a general form just  as your reply was coming in. Take a look at the question that I was summarizing. What do you think. Is enlightenment just the human brain in development? Fixing it's  glitches?

Just to knock this on its head (I'm not coming from a place of 'having answers', but of always questioning questions) - why should enlightenment have any purpose?  You're writing from a perspective of enlightenment having a 'point'.  What if it doesn't?  What if it's just a potential thing, as much or as valid as any other potential thing?

Your first question is permeated with a sense that questions need answers.  That because we have questions, there ARE answers.

A while back, I was listening to McKenna's Damndest audiobook, and I suddently realised something: he describes enlightenment as "the end of knowing".  And we can easily take this to mean "the ultimate knowledge".  But it can also mean "no knowledge".  Approaching questions and the need for answers with the possibility of "no knowledge" in mind can take you to an interesting place: not of ignorance, but of eating through concept-models.

As for the big question of "what is enlightenment?", if you are still asking that question and have ANY concept of what it is, that concept is wrong.  It is wrong because it is a concept.  I have no idea what it is, but I know that every imagining of what it is as been wrong, and is wrong because the imagining lives within the imagination.  It's why I get buggy on these forums: I see too many people trading ideas on what enlightenment is, or what this means or that means, and not enough people calling out their own bullshit.

The only thing I can suggest, really, is to Dig Dig Dig.  Disregard what anyone says, including Leo, me, Mooji, Tolle, McKenna, Adyashanti, Spira or whoever the hell else, and do the maths yourself.

[cetus]

3 minutes ago, Prabhaker said:

MIND IS A DISEASE.

Now we're on the same page. This is exactly what I felt when I woke this morning.

[Telepresent]

8 minutes ago, Prabhaker said:

MIND IS A DISEASE

2 minutes ago, cetus56 said:

Now we're on the same page. This is exactly what I felt when I woke this morning.

Why?  I'm not challenging, but genuinely asking: what makes mind a disease?  Why?  What is wrong with ego?

 

[cetus]

3 minutes ago, Telepresent said:

why should enlightenment have any purpose?

I'm starting to see is a major turning point in the evolution of the human brain/mind.

[Telepresent]

1 minute ago, cetus56 said:

I'm starting to see is a major turning point in the evolution of the human brain/mind.

Cool.  From what to what?

[Prabhaker]

3 minutes ago, cetus56 said:

I'm looking at what exactly enlightenment means and what it's end result is.

You can know it through logic, words, language. You can live it. 

Something can be said about enlightenment but it whatever said will not be enough.

 

[Bob84]

Cant help but ask, where caveman enlightened?

[cetus]

1 minute ago, Telepresent said:

Cool.  From what to what?

Just off the cuff- From mind operating only from a sense of self  --to mind operating as aspect of all that exists.