Is Consciousness a Miracle?

[UnbornTao]

On 27/11/2023 at 3:44 AM, Carl-Richard said:

Again, a method can be useful even if it's not always necessary. How do you explain the sense of progression and coherence from the beginning of the meditation session to the end where the awakening occurs? If what happens during the meditation doesn't matter at all, why is meditation the experience of getting more and more relaxation/bliss and awakening the experience of hitting a threshold of relaxation/bliss?

Next scenario: I was on a plane on my way home from a vacation, and I decided to listen to music while breathing deeply and sitting in an extremely upright posture (my brother can vouch for the "extreme" part: he commented on it). Again, it was progressively building up to it, and maybe 45 minutes into it, I entered such a blissful state that a part of my mind eventually said "oh shit, I'm dying!". I quickly opened my eyes and tried to grab my water bottle from my backpack, and the most bizarre experience of my life happened: it was quite literally as if somebody else was moving my body and picking up the bottle for me and opening it. That is when I realized "oh shit, this is it". Then I looked out the window and saw the plane was about 10 seconds from landing, and then I was overcame by an immense wave of warm nostalgia and the realization that "this is where I have always been and where I always will be". I was about to shed tears of joy, but then I had to distract myself with the fact that I was on an airplane that had just landed. After that experience, I started having spontaneous awakenings.

Now, would any of that have happened if I instead had opened a magazine, sat with a crouched posture and with shallow breathing (as I had done for the previous flights that summer)? As for the spontaneous awakenings after that, would they have started happening at exactly the same time if I didn't do what I did on that airplane? If "no" to either of these questions, are the "methods" involved in these scenarios not at the very least predictive?

But we must get clear on what methods are helpful for:

• focusing and opening up one's mind
• producing altered states
• increasing awareness
• developing sensitivity, etc.

These don't hurt. Such leaps, in any case, are sudden, unexpected; they don't follow a logical progression nor a process -- these are functions of time. The mind is the one concerned with logic, progression, and trying to latch onto the consciousness; it is not up to the task, though. 

You are focused on achieving a state of relaxation, that's fine. What can result from a method and practice is something other than this absolute business.

Predictive of what? If what you're talking about is phenomena, sure. Long periods of meditation help produce all kinds of altered states that can be blissful, terrifying and everything in between. Prediction relies on time and process, just as actions, events, and results, which are relative.

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Well, the core "lesson" I got from that "change in state" was identical to all the other dozens (maybe hundreds) of awakenings I've had: "this is it". If you don't want to call this awakening or something that points to enlightenment, then at least invent some other term for me. Hell, even today with my covid-induced brain fog, I tapped into that experience again while listening to music and working out. It's gotten rarer over the years as I've (ironically) stopped meditating regularly, but it's still fundamentally the same experience: complete immersion and merging with reality, a lack of sense of distance between things, lack of sense of time, separation, "being the center", doership, self-concern.

Your mind makes up the associations after the fact. It tries to interpret what it considered happened in order to understand it and find a way to reproduce it, which can't happen.

Seems like you're referring to perceptive phenomena, so it's difficult to say whether it was a satori or something else. What are you? What are you conscious of now that you weren't of before? I suspect that if it were a profound satori, the self-referential notion to share the experience, to avoid crying, etc. wouldn't have come up for you as there'd have been no one there to share it. If it can be predicted, then I'd say it is something else, a shift in state likely precipitated by belief and circumstances.

I experienced a "no-self" insight while walking my dog. I didn't consider it to be an enlightenment, even though it was an unusual and joyful experience preceded by a state of radical openness. I realized that who I am is not my self. In other words, I was able to experientially make the distinction between my nature and my self -- who I confused my nature to be throughout all of my life. My nature remains an unknown for now. Notice, however, that this is an interpretation of mine, a story crafted after the fact, the consciousness itself is in a completely different domain.

We want to make sure that what we're talking about is a direct, personal consciousness into one's nature and whether we've "experienced" that. If not, we should acknowledge that we don't actually know what we are talking about, no matter the ideas and concepts that we hold about this matter. Let's leave as much crap as we can aside, and start from authentic experience.

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Meditation (for me) is just aimed at Being. It's a method, and an useful one at that. Contemplatation can also be a method that is useful. And just like any method, it might not be necessary for invoking the experience in question, but it can invoke it.

When you talk of meditation as an activity "aimed at Being", you're still holding Being as an activity and as a process, not as what is. An activity is an action and so relates to what isn't.

It's up to you to "invoke" it, it's not external to you. The practice can't and won't do it for you.

The Absolute is grasping it. Don't conflate circumstances with the awareness itself. Unfortunately, there's no pill that can produce this realization, as it is independent of the method. We'd like to come up with a way to access such consciousness but are stuck in a world of relativity (the "dream"). No matter what we come up with, they are relative inventions.

Oh, and it isn't an experience. Experience is indirect. This is key. I say experience for lack of a better word. What's considered to be experienced seems to be conceptually-based, or at least dominated by concept, added upon "reality", whatever that is. 

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Or lighting the fire and waiting to see when the building collapses. See, you do value method, just in an extremely constrained way. If you truly didn't value method, you wouldn't suggest contemplation as a method. And again, it is a method, because you can get the realization without contemplation, as I have, in fact in both experiences detailed in this thread. I can keep going on detailing my experiences. This virus isn't exactly making me concerned about brevity.

As long as the "method" is taken to be contemplation, yes. What I hold to be essential is setting out to experience what's true, being open that such a leap is possible for you. This needn't take any form nor formal practice, just the intention to get it now. This is contemplation.

In my view, contemplation did occur for you. I doubt that without things such as wonder, openness, presence, and the possibility of personally grasping it, that it would have happened. It is very simple and direct; seems like the only thing to "do" apart from grasping it.

Components: You intending to get who you are now. That's it.

Edited December 1, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Carl-Richard]

@UnbornTao So what I gather from this conversation (which we've had before and which I don't think will lead to an agreement) is:

I think there are methods for reliably increasing the chances of enlightenment, just like all the religious traditions that span back 15000 years, just like all the New Age spiritual teachers who are not Neo-Advaitans (Sadhguru, Rupert Spira, etc.). You think there aren't. You point to the spontaneous and irreducible nature of the realization and argue against the utility of methods, because it's all inherently uncertain, thus we cannot rely on methods.

I can understand the impulse of acknowledging the spontaneity or irreducible complexity associated with the realization, but uncertainty does not mean impossibility; it still allows for probability (and distinguishing between different probabilities). In other words, the uncertainty is not the whole story, and fixating on it is no good. Also, while the realization itself is "absolute", there is a relative side to it as well, and treating the realization as only absolute is therefore an unfortunate conflation.

If enlightenment was purely absolute, nobody in their right mind would talk to humans in the relative realm trying to wake them up. "What do you mean enlightenment? If it's absolute, then surely I must already be enlightened, right? What must change for that to happen, and what is change but relativity?" As long as we are here as humans, we're using methods, and some are probably better than others.

Edited November 29, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[UnbornTao]

@Carl-Richard

Inaccurate but bears repeating: What's done within the dream, occurs within dream. For instance, you could drink coffee while dreaming, hoping that that will wake you up. Maybe it helps in some way from your current point of view. In the dream, doing so may make sense as you're stuck within it and can't see beyond it. In this analogy, we can see that this mindset doesn't apply. The waking up is a different domain than the dreaming. You wake up whenever you do irrespective of the dreaming.

I've said methods can help focus the mind, etc. As human inventions, few methods seem to be purely aimed at direct consciousness, even though many of them may offer that as a selling point. Many methods are plain ineffective and misleading, a set of superstitious rituals that require adherence to their cosmology in order to get a sense of progress towards the promised results. Besides, as the final destination isn't known by us but imagined, we have to trust what the practice stipulates as the end goal, hoping for the best. As tools, we use methods to achieve certain ends. The mind might want to come up with a way to understand this subject, inventing a method to get there -- it doesn't work that way. For example, you might have an enlightenment just after hitting your head against the kitchen counter, but the relationship is made up by your mind. Just so with any other method. No method can possibly produce enlightenment; it can help in taming the mind by giving it some toy to chew on -- a discipline, an object of contemplation, etc. And then somehow enlightenments occur.

It is paradoxical. Can't find yourself, since everywhere you look for is relative, and yet wondering and intent seem to help in grasping it.

I still think you're holding the matter as relative, so when you experience something unusual and powerful, you think of that as awakening. When you talk of uncertainty, complexity, and spontaneity, you're talking about something experienced, even if preceded by intense meditation. They don't apply to the Absolute. It is true now. No change needed. Our experience is relative, which doesn't mean one's nature is relative too. We might have gotten too far with the speculation and intellectualizing, which is what this is.

You are not a perception.

What are the implications of the above assertion, assuming that it is true?

What can be done within the domain of experience that somehow produces such a leap? How can you manipulate yourself and your experience, the condition you're in, into having absolute consciousness?

We're back at square one. Anything we come up with and have adopted about, enlightenment, is bullshit, a distraction from the real work. Better get busy contemplating! In the end, it doesn't matter how you arrive at the truth, as long as you do.

Edited December 1, 2023 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

@Carl-Richard Funnily enough, this was just released. Deals with this topic in a way similar to mine:

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by UnbornTao

[Carl-Richard]

@UnbornTao Is this when I post a video of Peter Ralston (Brendan's guru) speaking positively about methods?  

Most of these apparent disagreements is about a difference in emphasis or language, and the emphasis might vary depending on the context and who is being talked to. Somebody who is very far along the path and who has tried many methods but doesn't seem to get anywhere, might benefit from being pointed to "directness", while somebody who can't even sit still for 2 seconds without getting lost in a neurotic storm of thoughts, might benefit from learning how to follow their breath. Yet somebody else who is both naturally contemplative and extremely adept at sitting in silence, might need very little direction or practice. Spirituality is generally not a one-size-fits-all enterprise.

Edited December 2, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Phoebe]

Telling people to have a non-method is itself a relative thing, unless you're pointing to Nothingness.

[UnbornTao]

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

@UnbornTao Is this when I post a video of Peter Ralston (Brendan's guru) speaking positively about methods?  

Most of these apparent disagreements is about a difference in emphasis or language, and the emphasis might vary depending on the context and who is being talked to. Somebody who is very far along the path and who has tried many methods but doesn't seem to get anywhere, might benefit from being pointed to "directness", while somebody who can't even sit still for 2 seconds without getting lost in a neurotic storm of thoughts, might benefit from learning how to follow their breath. Yet somebody else who is both naturally contemplative and extremely adept at sitting in silence, might need very little direction or practice. Spirituality is generally not a one-size-fits-all enterprise.

No. The point is that whatever methods are useful for, enlightenment isn't one of those uses. I already said methods are helpful, but won't produce satori. You're talking about experience.

It isn't about spirituality.