Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 149

I wanted to share this excellent description of what enlightenment feels like, by Suzanne Segal, so you're clear what you're shooting for:

"After months of this mystifying witness awareness, something changed yet again: The witness disappeared. The disappearance of the witness meant the disappearance of the last vestiges of the experience of personal identity. The witness had at least held a location for a 'me', albeit a distant one. In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a 'me' at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again."

"The personal self was gone, yet here was a body and a mind that still existed empty of anyone who occupied them. The experience of living without a somebody, an 'I' or a 'me', is exceeding difficult to describe, but it is absolutely unmistakable. When the personal self disappears, there is no one inside who can be located as being you. The body is only an outline, empty of everything of which it had previously felt full."

"The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone — there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function unimpaired; apparently they did not need an 'I' to keep doing what they always did."

"In an attempt to understand what had occurred, the mind began working overtime, generating endless questions, all unanswerable. Who thought? Who felt? Who was afraid? Who were people talking to when they spoke to me? Who were they looking at? Why was there a reflection in the mirror, since there was no one there? Why did these eyes open in the morning? Why did this body continue? Who was living? Life became one long, unbroken koan, forever unsolvable, forever mysterious, completely out of reach of the mind's capacity to comprehend."

"The oddest moments occurred when any reference was made to my name. If I had to write it on a check or sign a letter, I would stare at the letters on the paper and the mind would drown in perplexity. The name referred to no one. Without a personal self, the inside or internal simply did not exist. The inward-turning motion of the mind became the most bizarre of experience when time and again it found total emptiness where it had previously found an object to perceive, a self-concept."

"The more baffled the mind became, the greater the fear. Worst of all, simultaneous with the cessation of personal identity, the experience of sleep had changed radically, leaving me with no escape from the constant awareness of emptiness of self. Sleeping and dreaming now contained the awareness of no one who slept or dreamed, just as the waking state of consciousness contained the awareness that there was no one who was awake."

"In that moment a deep despair settled over the mind as it realized that I would never again experience having a personal self — even though the mind could never grasp how that was possible. I walked around wondering who was still alive. I wandered the streets gazing into every shop window, praying that the next glimpse of my reflection would bring back a flicker of recognition, praying for a solid experience of seeing myself in the eyes that stared back from the window's glare. It never happened."

It's time to grow up; time to stop pretending there's a you here.

Credit: Collision With The Infinite by Suzanne Segal

When are you going to finally face up to your web of excuses?

One of the most outrageous unacknowledged crimes committed by the U.S. government:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The above is a verbatim confession of Nixon administration and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman.

Source: Harper's Magazine, Legalize It All

That psychedelics are illegal and so demonized by the state is a crime against human rights. What they taught you in school about psychedelics — and what has now become the general population's default position on psychedelics — was a propagandistic, scientifically invalid load of horseshit. A political smear campaign which will take us more than a century to correct.

Make no mistake, we are still in the Dark Ages. If only people knew to what extent... Of course the very tools that can quickly and easily show the extent are demonized and outlawed. The ego's devilry knows no bounds. It simultaneously does its dirty work at the private and collective levels, without qualms.

For the same reasons, The War on Terrorism will prove a far greater failure than The War on Drugs.

A few months ago I heard doctor Jeffery Martin of the Finder's Course — who's doing great research on enlightenment in an academic setting — referring to enlightenment as "persistent non-symbolic experience".

At first I thought: what an awkward way to phrase it.

But the more I meditate and self-inquire, the more I see the power of this phrasing. Because it captures the essence of what we're aiming for.

What are we REALLY trying to do when we meditate or self-inquire?

We're trying to escape symbolic experience! Monkey mind is symbolic experience. Rationalization is symbolic experience. Traditional learning is symbolic experience. Talking is symbolic experience. Western philosophy is symbolic experience. Science is symbolic experience.

See?

To escape all that and to see reality AS-IT-IS you have to drop symbolizing. Because symbols, by definition, are NOT the things they represent. People really overlook this simple point: to symbolize a thing is to immediately misrepresent it. Because you have to substitute the thing itself with a second thing, while forgetting the second thing's being! This is the core of how illusion happens. Symbols cannot get at the BEING-level of anything. All symbols are metaphorical, which means they aren't the bottom-most level.

Mindfulness = the opposite of symbolism. Mindfulness is the untying of the knot of being wrapped up in language, to return back to a non-linguistic, non-symbolic mode of being.

First-order reality is non-symbolic. Second-order reality is symbolic, but this entire second order is by virtue of the first. It's eye opening to pause throughout the day and realize, "Oh, hey! I've been lost in symbolic reality all day. That's not primary! Let me get back to what's primary by letting go of all this symbolizing."

Symbols are a very powerful tool. Just think of how much it has allowed mankind to achieve. But like all powerful tools, when used unconsciously, it's a source of great suffering and danger. Symbols creates the possibility for delusion.

This insight is MASSIVE in it's scope and significance. It will take you years of mindfulness practice to grasp what I'm saying. But that's okay, it will be worth it.

Anal-Haq (pronounced: an'aaal h'aaak) is an Arabic phrase which translates as, "I am Truth".

This phrase was famously uttered by the great Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj, who was executed in Baghdad in the year 922 A.D. for proclaiming: "Anal-Haq! Anal-Haq!"

"I am God! I am God!"

Read more about Anal-Haq and Mansur Al-Hallaj on Wikipedia.

Of course he was dead-on. So much so it got him hung. A tragic example of how organized religion backfires, killing the very truth its meant to promote.

I wanted to bring this phrase to your attention so you could add it to your nonduality lexicon. I love collecting and studying the many different phrases for enlightenment found around the world. Hopefully this expands your appreciation of mystical traditions around the world and makes your pursuit of nonduality more cosmopolitan.

Be diligent with your self-inquiry work, and one day you will exclaim "Anal-Haq!!!" with a shit-eating grin.

I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart
I asked, "Who are You?"
He replied, "You".

"Rational" people tend to dismiss too-easily various religious, spiritual, mystical, and folkloric traditions from around the world, and from the past. The reality is that even though many of these traditions contain much dogma and nonsense, they also contain hidden truths grounded in hard empirical facts. It's just that often these are edge-case, non-mainstream phenomena.

Here's an illustrative example:

Did you know that Will-o-the-wisps actually exist?

Yeah, I'm not kidding. Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o'-the-wisp

Apparently it's a real phenomena found in swamps and marshes. As various gases escape the swamp, they create an eerie display of glowing light, often interpreted by unsuspecting folk as a ghost or water spirit.

Pretty cool, eh?

It's important that we learn the epistemic lesson here: just because something sounds spooky or mystical doesn't mean there isn't something real behind it. Reality can be stranger than fiction.

In my own research and experience, I'm finding enormous value in studying and trying to understand the esoteric traditions of the past. Humans were A LOT wiser in the past than we were taught in school. This is easy to overlook because we basically live in a modern culture of idiocracy. Our culture places way too much emphasis on the mainstream, the low-brow, and technology.

If science was clever, it would re-visit all the ancient myths from all the world's cultures with the aim of validating them, so that we may discover all their possible empirical origins. This could be a research project worthy of a Nobel prize. My hunch is, it would yield some fruit.

Following up on my video The Role Of Balance In Personal Development, I wanted to clarify what real balance looks like.

So I drew this little diagram:

So in this case what the diagram represents are the possible ways to balance the issue of science vs mysticism. This is just one facet — out of dozens — that you'll have to balance in your life. Look at this like a spectrum. On the far left you've got the hard-nosed science position. On the far right you've got the very religious/mystical position.

Most people have a naive notion of balance. They think of balance as depicted by the green dotted lines above. Balance to them either means going straight down the middle on an issue, or down one of the sides.

But real balance looks more like the purple line above. It's jagged and nuanced. Drawing that jagged line requires a real exploration of the issue. It takes work. How much easier to be an ideologue and draw one of the dotted lines.

Of course this applies to all the other facets of life:

• Career vs family
• Personal development vs pursuit of enlightenment
• Being an asshole vs being too nice
• Theory vs practice
• Pragmatism vs idealism
• Art vs marketing
• Chasing money vs neglecting money
• Doing vs being
• Expressing emotions vs suppressing emotions
• Capitalism vs communism
• Privacy rights vs defending against terrorism
• Etc.

Amazing video for serious consciousness explorers. Kilindi is a badass.

Do you have the balls to do a 30g mushroom trip?

I see many rationalist, pragmatic, skeptic, and scientifically-minded people misunderstanding the origin of the phenomena of worship. They tend to see it as a hoax or a con perpetrated by shysters and demagogues on small-minded folk who haven't learned enough critical thinking skills. But that's not true worship.

Yes, there is that silly form of worship, such as maybe worshiping the Pope. People worship the Pope without even knowing what the guy did or why he's Pope. He could be an elitist asshole and people would still bow to him. This is false worship. Needless to say it's neurotic, dangerous, and small-minded. This kind of worship is easy to denounce for scientifically-minded people.

But if you're really curious about reality, you gotta wonder, "Where did the idea for worshiping the Pope come from? Is it just a complete fabrication? Or could it be an imitation? And if so, an imitation of what? Why would any commonsense person worship another? Is it really just because they are simple-minded?"

Turns out there is such a thing as TRUE worship — it just gets conveniently ignored because it requires a certain rare kind of experience in order to appreciate. True worship happens when you are in the presence of a truly masterful human being, and you have the requisite awareness and knowledge base to actually fathom the depth of his mastery. So advanced is his mastery that from your point of view, it is inhuman. It is incredible. It is impossible. So advanced is his mastery, it strikes you with awe like a sledgehammer. It's a physical experience of awe. This is real worship, and you can experience it if you go deep enough in this work.

The deepest field of human mastery — by a long shot — is not business, or military, or art, or science, or sports. It's self-mastery and consciousness-mastery. How can I make such a bold claim? Because mastery of the self is the most emotionally laborious and trickiest endeavor possible for a human being. Just try it! Everything else is easy by comparison. A human being who has thoroughly mastered himself cannot help but evoke awe (or anger) in those who come in contact with him. Because he's like a totally different class of human being (while at the same time not really above anyone). Here is a guy who has accomplished something that you never imagined possible. Here is a guy who has accomplished something that you personally KNOW is amazing, because deep down inside you know how little control you have over yourself.

And that's the true origin of religious worship. Mystics — the guys who were the seeds of every serious religion — were such people. They mastered themselves so thoroughly that even 3000 years ago, before books, newspapers, radio, TV, advertising, and social media, they were able to amass huge followings — not through false promises and gimmickry as "skeptics" like to believe — but by evoking genuine awe. An awe which was deserved.

Mystics were the original Purple Cows!

This is a phenomena that you can still experience for yourself today. There are people alive right now whose self-mastery is so deep that should you meet them face-to-face, you will be genuinely awed and humbled.

Sound far-fetched? I dare you to put your own skepticism to the test!

But be warned, a true worship experience will not reveal itself to "skeptics", cynics, dabblers, and smart-asses. This isn't college philosophy or debate class. You must first put some skin in the game. Only after years of your own pitiful meditation or self-help efforts will you be in a position to fully appreciate the achievements of a master. You don't even have enough experience yet to realize just how deep this deepest field of human mastery goes. It would make you dizzy and ill to your stomach to find out all at once. Which is why it's so easy for people to play the skeptic.

Only when the student is serious, will the master be revealed.

The song that I originally wanted to use for the Gallery of Absolute Infinity, but couldn't due to copyright:

People sometimes comment, "But Leo! What more is there beyond enlightenment?"

E-fucking-cology!

Ecology is a big theme I will push in the future. You cannot keep living as though you are the only consciousness on this planet. There is a much bigger game to be played. Every decent human being will be required to think and act ecologically in the future. Ego is inversely proportional to ecology.

If you cannot be ecological, there is no kensho.