tsuki

@Joseph Maynor You're just too much. You make me feel embarrassed .

@Joseph Maynor You know, jokes that need explaining are not worth saying.

*Applauds with one hand*

Mu

You stop being bored. Because we have preferences. Boredom is a feeling that arises. "Enduring" is doing. Do not do.

Today you must be perfectly calm and restored, because you are going to learn not-doing in spite of the fact that there is no way to talk about it, because it is the body that does it. That rock over there is a rock because of doing. You say that you don't understand what I mean. Your saying that is doing. Doing is what makes that rock a rock and that bush a bush. Doing is what makes you yourself and me myself. Take that rock for instance. To look at it is doing, but to see it is not-doing. You say my words are not making sense to you. Oh yes they do. But you are convinced that they don't because that is your doing. That is the way you act towards me and the world. That rock is a rock because of all the things you know how to do to it. I call that doing. A man of knowledge, for instance, knows that the rock is a rock only because of doing, so if he doesn't want the rock to be a rock all he has to do is not-doing. The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making it so. If you didn't know its doing, the world would be different. Without that certain doing there would be nothing familiar in the surroundings. This is a pebble because you know the doing involved in making it into a pebble. Now, in order to stop the world you must stop doing. In the case of this little rock, the first thing which doing does to it is to shrink it to this size. So the proper thing to do, which a warrior does if he wants to stop the world, is to enlarge a little rock, or any other thing, by not-doing. Look at the holes and depressions in the pebble and try to pick out the minute detail in them. If you can pick out the detail, the holes and depressions will disappear and you will understand what not-doing means. Doing makes you separate the pebble from the larger boulder. If you want to learn not-doing, let's say that you have to join them. See the small shadow that the pebble cast on the boulder. It is not a shadow but a glue which binds them together. A warrior can tell all kinds of things from the shadows. A warrior always tries to affect the force of doing by changing it into not-doing. Doing would be to leave the pebble lying around because it is merely a small rock. Not-doing would be to proceed with that pebble as if it were something far beyond a mere rock. Is all this true? To say yes or no to that question is doing. But since you are learning not-doing I have to tell you that it really doesn't matter whether or not all this is true. It is here that a warrior has a point of advantage over the average man.

This whole racket is caused by people expecting teachers to be perfect and getting brutally woken up. I can clearly see how his methods could work and how it makes perfect sense to abhor them. Mooji's project is getting out of hand. He lacks the skill to use his tools. Acting out of desire to help others is a distraction. Acting out of desire to help yourself is a distraction. Acting out of desire to avoid distraction is a distraction.

I have no clue what Love is, but I'm glad that it knows what I am. Egoic love on the other hand is just a shadow-based attraction. Unexplainable familiarity of another that promises to satisfy the needs that we disown. It is reciprocated when shadows are symmetrical. It is unrequited when they're not. This is how we know that we want that person, but we can't explain why.

The only fruitful application of the mind is deconstruction of the past to prevent identity from forming.

So, the basic dichotomy of self and other comes from believing in symmetry. I believe that this egoic structure is multiplied across entities, each of which have their own personal stories that are rooted in ignorance. My aversion to conscious use of power stems from my belief that other people avoid suffering like I do. The conflict comes from the need to use power to satisfy my needs/desires. If I were to own this belief of symmetry, I would have to admit that in my everyday experience: I suffer in place of other people. I am their suffering. I want to use power to satisfy my needs that stem from the attachments that I am ultimately responsible for. The other important insight is about suffering itself. It is simply unwillingness to face whatever is occurring in the present moment. The mind, the chatty thing that keeps making plans to avoid suffering is the suffering itself. I need power to secure my attachments. My attachments are what I use to avoid things that occur in the present moment. If I were to resolve my striving, I need to be present. The mind is a self-sustaining structure that perpetuates suffering by avoiding suffering. How blind can I be? How deep will this rabbit hole go?

The other thing about slavery is that few benefit from many and they reign with power. What is power? It is the possibility to influence the actions of another. Power leverages attachments. Low forms of power threaten basic needs, such as the operation of the body. High forms of power threaten high needs such as belonging, or self-esteem.

All of life is codependent. I literally eat another beings. If I want food, I need to gather it myself, or have others to do it for me. Why would others give me food? I pay for the food with money I get from my employer and I give it away when I buy things at a supermarket. Money's worth is grounded in belief that I can exchange it for goods. I believe that others believe that as well. Theoretically, I can learn to live off the land and grow my own food. Practically, I would have to re-orient my whole life to achieve that feat. I don't want that. It's wasteful towards my identity. The structure of employment is fractal. I am made of my organs and my workplace is made of me. I need resources and so does the company. Money provides the abstraction for resources for the company and it is funneled down to me and my coworkers. Money is a useful invention because it provides layers of abstraction. Thanks to it, the structure is self-organizing. I am dependent on my employer, but my employer is dependent on his clients. My organs are dependent on me. I jump his hoops and he jumps their hoops. It's a difference in scope. I am dependent on my company, but the company is dependent on me. We exchange resources. I get money and it gets work done. There is also a positive feedback loop because I get original challenges to overcome so that I can suffer and become wiser. The company also benefits from my wisdom because people's job is to embody ideas and the flexibility of identity increases with wisdom. What are the characteristics of a slave? The most defining one is the fact that it is being controlled by people that benefit off his work. The second important one is his inability to leave on his own accord.

By letting go.

I was wondering about wage slavery recently. I don't like being called a slave. I also don't like the fact that I don't like to be called a slave, so I'll investigate that. When is slavery okay? When isn't slavery okay?

@jamsterX Integration is not about creating more stories. Stop doing that. It's about seeing how your past stories are false and letting go of them.

@9thlife Because you're ignorant. You believe the stories you tell yourself about death - that it will bring you peace. The truth is that you don't know. What if even greater horrors await you there? With correct practice you can die while you live and see for yourself.

Yes, indeed we're talking about two different things. I just realized that. What you call common sense I would call practicality. Indeed, practicality seems to lessen in highly educated people, but I think that it is a byproduct of how we educate them. During education, we need standardized tests that have correct and incorrect answers to effectively grade students. Problems that spring organically never have "correct" solutions. All solutions inevitably fail, sooner or later, and we usually implement the most plausible one, so there is no room for comparison. This is never taught in schools because it undermines its whole philosophy. In real life problems, there is always this sense of uncertainty, shakiness. Theoretically-minded people try to solve this uncertainty by trying to analyse the problem down to its fundamental parts, but there are no fundamental parts. Depending on the theory one uses, the parts are different. There can also be no theory of which theory to apply, so this open-endedness of organic tasks is irreducible. It is a sign of being lost in the mind. The mind does not fix problems. It matches patterns. Theories are patterns. So, is there any point in learning theories? YES! This is the mistake that many practically-minded people make. Theories are distillation of practice to core principles. We can simulate reality using imagination using these core principles. The missing ingredient of education seems to be deliberate theory-making and theory deconstruction. A hand works with a hammer, but the mind works with theories. They are tools. What practically minded people often miss is the fact that they have their own theories of how things work, but these theories are much less developed than the ones that are taught. Scientists are the the people that craft the tools for the mind to work with. These tools are industrial grade, not just home brewed. I called common sense belief, because in my epistemology everything the mind works with is a belief. It is fundamentally grounded in ignorance (blindness). Simple unwillingness to deconstruct it. This is the tier one ego's job.

@kieranperez Your problems stem from mixing the relative and the absolute perspective. You are projecting your current meaning onto the world. The endgame is not to raise consciousness, or to enlighten everybody. Once you get it, there will be no point in enlightening anybody else. There will be no anybody else anymore. You are trying to play a spiritual version of a lesser jihad. It's a distraction.

@MellowEd If you want to state what you feel - wait until you can tell the difference between love and infatuation. If you want to declare your commitment - wait until you know that you want to devote your life to her.

I associate common sense with unexamined beliefs. Stages in tier one try to stabilize their sense of reality by constructing increasingly sophisticated (and inclusive) belief systems. These belief systems are grounded in ignorance (blindness). It manifests as a convenient loss of lucidity when the belief system is challenged. A person is unable to hear what the challenger says, as if he was speaking a different language. Words are grammatically and semantically coherent, but they do not connect. They are listened to solely for the purpose of formulating a coherent response. Emotions are given in to and they trigger pre-trained defensive thought loops. Blue ego is the first one to acknowledge the existence of belief. It uses its own belief system as a standard of validity of other belief systems. Orange ego recognizes the possibility of questioning its own beliefs. It uses consistency as the degree of certainty of a given belief system. Left brain thinking. Green ego recognizes that no belief system can ever be fully consistent. It believes consistency to be inferior (incomplete) and focuses on right brain thinking. In this sense, the first tier is driven by the examination of beliefs, a departure from common sense. Of course, common sense is still present because the exploration does not transcend belief, but simply makes it more and more subtle. This is the root cause of inter-stage conflict in my opinion. Because each stage expects other stages to behave according to their own unexamined standard. Green is a difficult stage because it is a kind of a dead end with respect to beliefs. Everything has been explored, but it needs to be integrated. Left and right brain seem incompatible because if one tries to use both, the result is a paradox. It seems like no answers can be given this way. The shift comes from using paradox as a lens to see the truth. Yellow sees it is a pivot of a given perspective. Transcending beliefs in tier two comes from recognizing that common sense and introspection are a paradox. From one point of view, common sense is a basis for communication, but on the other hand - it needs to be examined to find one's individuality. These two ends are a root of conflict in tier one, but in tier two they form acausal loop that is not disturbing for the ego In tier two, common sense is more about gracefully resolving situations without referencing belief systems. (I'm tagging you @Joseph Maynor because it seems to be compatible with your work).

@Viking Can't you see that you create these obstacles for yourself just so that you keep being engaged with life? This buying into reality of life, into realness of suffering is samsara. Suffering will not cease post enlightenment. You will still suffer, but you will realize that it's your own doing and it will lose its grip. You will not treat it so seriously even if sensations will remain the same. Your life will be exactly the same after enlightenment. You will be even more clueless after you experience kensho. Accepting this cluelessness is the gateway to liberation with respect to overcoming doubt.

@Viking The only liberation there is comes from acceptance of aimlessness of existence and being okay with its darkness. Don't you get it? The first rule of the show is that show must go on. This is why you will always wander aimlessly. Enlightenment doesn't change that. Realization is when you know that you're okay with life. You are okay with it as you are right now, but you don't know that yet.

@Viking Do not bind yourself by seeking liberation. Looking for meaninglessness is meaningful. When you doubt, start doubting whether you should doubt or not.

In my experience, the maze always keeps up with me. When I reach a stable plateau of peace, I can't wait to see what crazy stuff is going to happen to upset it. The anticipation is a reward in itself.

@okulele It's called the law of conservation of effort .