There Are Levels To Enlightenment

[Will Bigger]

I'm going to synthesize bits from a few of this guy's articles, because they opened my eyes a bit.

1. Stream-Entry – the fetters of doubt, personal identity and attachment to rituals completely fall away.

2. Once-Returner – sensual desire and aversion are greatly attenuated, but still exist.

3. Non-Returner – sensual desire and aversion are extinguished.

4. Arahant – all craving is extinguished (including desire for fine material existence and existence in subtler levels), together with pride, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. This is what is rightly called nirvana, Enlightenment (jnana, vidya) or Liberation (moksha, mukti).

http://liveanddare.com/neo-advaita/8/

Notice how the illusion of personal identity is the first thing to fall away. Most people stop here, because they mistake it for Aranhat, or they stop caring. After the realization of your true nature, there's still a lot of work in integrating it to dissolve all your patterns and free yourself of suffering. Notice how most of the people giving Satsang in Southern California aren't at stage four (which is incredibly, incredibly rare; the Vedas say only one in a billion souls is at this level of total enlightenment).

Edit: scroll down, Leo makes an important point.

Edited February 26, 2017 by Will Bigger

[PureExp]

@Will Bigger I agree. Seems reasonable (but I have no experience at all if this is what happens and I never met anyone who could say so).

But I have a question for you -

Who or what has all those desires/aversions/pride and what is in bondage that gets liberated?

Is it body or ego (the autopilot of the body), or person (the mind, jumble of non-physical stuff e.g. thoughts), or is it the Consciousness itself that is bound?

[Will Bigger]

@PureExp I'll know when "I" am at stage one. Hahaha. Perhaps the survival instincts of the body? 

[PureExp]

@Will Bigger , perhaps you are being humble.

Survival instincts are exactly the ego. What would a free ego look like?

[Will Bigger]

 

11 minutes ago, PureExp said:

@Will Bigger Survival instincts are exactly the ego. What would a free ego look like?

I really don't know. All I can say for certain, is that there is a difference between certain teachers, with intuition definitely  saying who's a Buddha, and who's just awake, if you know what I mean. I think Leo refers to the difference as self mastery.

Edited February 26, 2017 by Will Bigger

[Leo Gura]

@Will Bigger There are levels and facets to enlightenment, but I don't like that classic 4 stage Buddhist model you listed. Because the stages are very poorly defined and mix-and-match metaphysical insights with spiritual purification, and even morality. This can become a very misleading map.

There are many ways to map it, and potentially many more levels than 4, and it's not just a one-dimensional ladder. There are forks and off-shoots, and there's spiritual development which is really tangential to enlightenment insights themselves. There's also personal development. So it gets messy.

What's even more complex, is that due to the incommunicable nature of this work, and the fact that people have different brains and genetics (or karma, or past lives, or whatever), levels of consciousness may exist which very very very few people have ever attained. It may not even be possible for you to attain certain levels that others have, or vice versa. You just don't know. Which is why it's a good idea to stay humble and keep working, even after you've had a big breakthrough. Chances are you'll still have much to learn.

For a better understanding of the possible stages, see some of the books in my book list. And I'll be adding more books in the future on this topic. This is where a deep conceptual study of enlightenment/spirituality becomes indispensable. If you don't do the deep study, I pretty much guarantee you'll get misled by one map or another, and your attainment will be far shy of what's ultimately possible.

[Guivs]

@Will Bigger 

In my opinion, the ultimate sign of complete enlightenment is the attainment of the rainbow body at the time of death, way beyond the accomplishmetnt of being an arahat. When all karma, whatever, has been exhausted, everything that created this body. 

. But I'm so far from even the smallest state of enlightenement in my own experience that it is pretty much mental jerking and nonsense at this point  

Then again, I may be wrong and deluded about this. 

The main point to take from this though is that we ought not to rest on our laurels when we think we had an undeniable breakthrough, no matter how profound.

I might be really naive, but hereunder are rare photos of Drubwang Konchok Norbu Rinpoche that were shot at a retreat during which he said that ,finally, all the teachings he had learned and his many years of intensive practice had suddently come together and that he had eventually just reached full enlightenment. These photos were shot one second apart on autoflash, on a tripod on June 10, 2000. Makes me wonder, at least.

 

[Will Bigger]

@Guivs oh yeah. Whether or not those specific photos are legitimate, I wouldn't doubt that some very crazy things happen as consciousness grows. What's stopping weird things from happening? All of this reality is just consciousness; the only thing which makes it all seem to obey certain laws is the fact that most beings operate at a very similar [low] frequency of awareness. When someone with a highly raised awareness interacts with this world, we call it a miracle, when really it's just a higher consciousness overwhelming a lower one.

theres a reason that in the Christian tradition, a servant of God is sometim s called a "love slave." Christ's consciousness totally overwhelms ours, so we can become it.

Edited February 26, 2017 by Will Bigger

[Guivs]

@Will Bigger Yeah, those phenomena fascinate me (a bit) too much, I think  (cfr my post in "Attempt To Bridge Buddhist With Christian Principles")

Oh well, it's inspiring, people love "so-called" miracles

[Hsinav]

On 2017-02-26 at 6:36 AM, Will Bigger said:

I'm going to synthesize bits from a few of this guy's articles, because they opened my eyes a bit.

1. Stream-Entry – the fetters of doubt, personal identity and attachment to rituals completely fall away.

2. Once-Returner – sensual desire and aversion are greatly attenuated, but still exist.

3. Non-Returner – sensual desire and aversion are extinguished.

4. Arahant – all craving is extinguished (including desire for fine material existence and existence in subtler levels), together with pride, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. This is what is rightly called nirvana, Enlightenment (jnana, vidya) or Liberation (moksha, mukti).

 

It seems lika a lot of spiritual seekers fall in the trap of desiring the things on this list, which automatically put them out of the list.