tsuki

Has anybody mentioned Dark Souls? Fantastic game in itself, but what really got me hooked is the meaninglessness aspect. You play the game despite being beaten to a pulp every corner just for fun. Once you start to rush it to get to the end - the game starts to fight back so hard that it becomes completely unplayable. You have to sit and play it just for the sake of it and accept it. It's like hard determination sitting, but with a controller Brilliant!

So, to you they are some sort of divine revelation? The reality has spoken thing? How do you differentiate that from another layer of illusion? By the mere fact that you are absolutely sure of their correctness? The mystical aspect? Aren't thoughts like that too? Aren't you absolutely sure that you are understanding what I'm saying and not seeing some projection of your own understanding right now? Is that understanding a thought or an insight?

Don't let this sentence misguide you. Insight is no less and no more than a thought. In the same sense thought is insight-driven. Once an insight has occurred, one is more resistant to silly ideas taken from others and from the society and is free to construct original, more holistic thoughts. Thoughts that include more and more reality and do not see perspectives as good or bad. The more insights one experienced, the more he is willing to abandon his models of reality once it is apparent that they no longer work. Feelings are a great tool for evaluating thought systems. Negative emotions occur when reality does not conform to one's model. One may try to change reality to conform it, or change the models to make better predictions. When enough insights had occurred, one is more willing to change himself than dictate dogmas for others.

From my experience, Insight is thought-driven. Let me clarify: Thought is a meaningful "snapshot" of reality. Meaningful in a sense that it is taken seriously. It is not simply an "idea" to be held that may or may not be true. Thoughts are something to be taken AS reality itself. It is a prosthesis, or a substitute for what is real. Thoughts construct themselves to make reality simpler than what it is and to protect one from its perceived dangers. Insight is an occurrence when different thoughts are combined and cancel each other out, leaving one with a feeling that reality is larger and much more nuanced than one has previously thought. It is not a deliberate action, but rather an occurrence. One is not driving the insights. Insights occur when one is ready to accept them. They form as one matures and show one's own ignorance in a very loving way. Wisdom is made of insights that show reality for what it is. In a sense, insights and thoughts are two sides of the same coin.

You can stop yourself from eating shit once you catch yourself doing it. Effortlessly. Once nothing is meaningful, eating healthy is meaningless as well.

Oooh, I know that. It's like a weight of your life was lifted off your shoulders. Beautiful, isn't it? So you're saying that it's gone?

Did you share it on the forum? How was it like?

@Saumaya Tell me one more thing: how did you come to terms with you being "it"? I don't know your background, it may very well be the case that you sought it for your whole life and it was a great relief. After being deceived for so many years by yourself, aren't you weary of possibility of losing your insight and going to sleep again?

@Saumaya Oh, I see. You can put like that.

Can you elaborate on existential suffering? What do you mean?

This is what happened to me as well. Fist was the self, then there was the other, and then they started to merge which was a hit in itself. Once they merged over a few months, it hit me again. Thanks!

Is the order of these experiences important in your understanding? Or you simply experienced them in this order?

@Joseph Maynor I think that is it a very important observation that everybody seems to know what is true, but nobody seems to agree on what is truth. To ask what is truth is to ask "What is true about truth?" and then to try and find a single answer, which would be true, of course! This self-referential question "what is truth?" is the very essence of the mind that got here in the first place. It constructs reality by transcending it - by finding meaning where is none. It creates meaning out of thin air by making observable, direct phenomena something that they are not. It makes the monitor a forum, a keyboard mouth and a "moving image of the mind" a memory. This meaning-making machine is not lying, per se. What the mind has constructed may become false only by the very mechanism of transcendence, of changing meaning. Whatever you see and "understand" is true and very moment that it changes meaning you declare your past experience as "false". In short: "Truth is whatever stops you from seeking". Is that sentence true? Does it stop you from seeking? You can always ask more questions, do you?

Welcome home @Patang. The cycle has completed itself! You can see it! Congratulations!

@Saumaya Haha! What does it even mean to be near enlightenment? #TooMysticalIndeed @Shin Certainly! Know thyself!

@Saumaya I'm not really sure about that. There seems to be a speed-up once you are getting close to awakening, but there is no way to tell the reason for this. There is a shift in perceiving time once awake, so your speeding up may be just a perception. You may have gotten to the "right" path to you that led you there faster. There may have never been a path and it always played itself out by itself and you simply became aware of it. There are millions of reasons for any of the above statement and once you realize that everything is relative - you are not so confident in making such claims. There are no key points to led you to the place you are. There are only events that you can backwards-rationalize to produce any story that seems fit. It doesn't make the story false, mind you. It's a decision to be made once you are aware of it. This reasoning is circular. There is no logical way out of it. There are no rights and wrongs in this discussion.

@SOUL, @Faceless Your discussion can be summed up like this: In order to choose the path to enlightenment, you need a set of criteria to discard invalid paths. Criteria are up for choosing. What are criteria to discard invalid criteria?

@Nahm I've gotten ahead of myself. I was seeing my own story. Instead of loving myself I decided to push myself away. It was a mistake. @Scholar You are going in the right direction. Keep digging, and you will become it. You may be interested in my story even if it's quite lengthy. Here's the link, you may relate to it:

@Scholar Aren't you seeing yourself in the text? Didn't it ever surprise you that a text is ambiguous and people will argue about it? When I say "truth", how do you know what I mean? By asking questions, you don't question the words you use to ask them. Truth is whatever stops you from seeking.

@Scholar Let me ask you: where does truth come from?

At this point all I have to say is this: applying logic is illogical. Logic cannot prove its own method. You apply logic and get results. You treat results as reality. By treating them as such, you create it. There is no difference between you being in control by understanding things and things playing themselves and you narrating a story afterwards. The answer to your enlightenment lies in the answer to the question: where is logic grounded? Once you answer this question sincerely and see what changes in the world, you may become enlightened.

@Scholar Logic is a feeling that A follows B. How is it logical that A follows B? When you see the two above sentences, how do you know that they correlate? Logic is an illusion. It's groundless.

@Scholar Consciousness is unconscious from a different perspective. When you move your hand, does your conscious process make the hand move? Does it move your muscles? Try first moving your hand, and try to move your hand by moving the muscles themselves to mimic the other. Can you? How do you know that you consciousness is the one moving your hand, and not narrating your thoughts, as the hand moves by itself?

See this: logical process itself is illogical. Why is there logic at all? 1) Mary ran over a cat. 2) The cat died. Where is the logical connection that points 1 -> 2? It's a feeling. It's illogical!

Thoughts think themselves. There is no reality, there is only you. What is the difference between you not understanding reality and reality playing itself out as you? You have control if you understand. If you don't - the thing plays itself.