winterknight

Ultimately all descriptors are unsatisfying. Simplicity and silence is best. No, it's not, so long as you don't expect to control God and when and how and if God "delivers" various goods. Inquire into who wants to stay into that state. Or investigate the exact fear involved deeply and pay it respect... see if you can deal with whatever concern it has. Or simply give up the desire to stay in that state. There is no "no control" state that matters. States don't matter. What you are, you are, regardless of the mind's fear. It's probably psychological. Follow my links and investigate your desires and mind through therapy, and alignment of action with desire. I'm not a huge fan of Tolle's pain body teachings, though I'm also not very familiar with them. Sorry not to be of more help. I would, however, say that there can of course be trauma -- and would recommend psychoanalytic psychotherapy or simply psychoanalysis to address it. I do not believe it should be regarded as a mere distraction to be done away with, but rather as an essential message that must be listened to and opened up. And you're welcome...

It really matters in the end not at all whether you believe the tree is real or not real, so long as you're interested enough to engage in intense self-inquiry. The game is not about intellectual beliefs, except inasmuch as you need to address them so that your mind is interested enough and focused enough to investigate itself.

Don't worry about the tree. Find yourself first, and then you will understand the tree.

Yeah, it's a good idea for a while. Eventually meditation has to be moved out of sitting meditation and conducted at all times.

Well sort of... that story had many meanings. But it's all facets of the same Inexpressible. Basically all statements are wrong, because all categories are egoic, so the closest statements would be statements to that effect -- negating dualities: it's neither X nor not X.

It would be more correct to say that there can neither be said to be appearance or no-appearance or both.

No, not in truth. Even those statements are not quite correct.

Read through these links to understand my whole philosophy. As I said in response to your earlier post, you need to be honest about your true desires -- your true feelings -- in order to quiet your mind enough to pursue spiritual inquiry.

Neither are correct, of course. Since I saw in a later post you're interested in pointer-value, there is no single answer to this question. It depends on the seeker -- what will get them to intuit the obvious. Or perhaps: "Awareness of" is itself the wrong way to think about Truth. Awareness "without an of" is better. And that then becomes a koan... So pursue the desire as best as you can.

Yes, in the end there is no ignorance and no dispelling of it. The very idea that there “is” ignorance is itself ignorance... it’s a seeming paradox. But one has to pretend ignorance exists at first if one is a seeker.

The fulfillment of your desire depends on other people. But the pursuit of them does not. And if it seems that you want something you can't have either a) you desire that state of pursuing something you seemingly can't get or b) perhaps you've misread your desire... go deeper into it. Yes desires are egocentric, but egocentric self-alignment is necessary in order to quiet the mind sufficiently to pursue self-inquiry.

The twist is my emphasis on aligning actions with desires and using metaphorization. It is not that "I feel bliss" all the time. The I doesn't exist. Bliss is the Self, but that is not an experience of bliss like normal bliss. Technically I neither wake or sleep. But if we're going to use inexact approximations, then yes I dream and sleep like "everyone else." No, no dead people. We're all immortal if any of us are. I'm not more immortal than anyone else. Moksha, nirvana, kaivalya are all words for the same thing. True liberation is destroying the misconception -- not just saying it, but actually recognizing it -- that there is such a thing as true liberation and that there is anything more to do or be than that unchangingness which you already are.

When the mind keeps looking for the Self expecting to 'see' it with the mind's eyes, you get the void-emptiness. No, one can no longer experience glimpses of sunlight when one is looking at sunlight 24/7. The "you" that wants happiness is not the real you, so none of the other questions can be answered accurately. There is no way, indeed, to accurately answer questions about the 'enlightened state.' Better to simply find out for yourself.

There's a few different levels at which this instruction can be understood. Traditional vedanta is jnana yoga -- that is, it's ultimately not about a practice -- it's about a destruction of ignorance through understanding. When the ignorance -- that is, incorrect beliefs -- are destroyed, what remains is the Self. So at one level, abide in the Self simply is a way of saying -- remember this understanding; understand again and again why the old understanding is wrong. When the old understanding is remembered once again to be wrong and abolished, what remains is the Self. At one level, again in traditional Vedanta, this can come to literally ruminating on and rehearsing ideas like "I am the Self" and "I am not the transient world." Or analogously, this also means -- avoid those thoughts premised on the incorrect belief of being a perishable, limited, body-mind. Again, when these thoughts/feelings are refrained from... what remains is the Self. All this could be said to be a sort of practice. But at a deeper level, we simply are the Self. So at a deeper level, this abidance instruction is simply an extension of a "pointer" -- a direct set of words that dispels ignorance simply by its being read or thought about. There is no further practice associated with it. Simply reading the text and understanding it is itself said to be sufficient; what then remains is the Self. Time to start digging into that fear. Why do you have that fear? Feel all the feelings associated with it; express them in words or in other artistic medium. See what desires and other history you have associated with it. Listen to the fear, in other words. It has a message for you. And strongly consider getting a psychoanalytic therapist.

Yes, but these are all concepts/thoughts. They are useful only for a while. The real thing is simple. Just relax your mind. You're there.

The enlightened experience cannot really be expressed in words, unfortunately... it couldn’t even really be said to be “mine.” It’s not really lack of desires, but a quiet mind — that is, a mind which is honest about what it wants and attempts to pursue it. And of course that then leads to the desires changing. if there is a total lack of desire, that may indeed be a sign of depression which may well in turn be a sign of dishonesty about desires/feelings or other unconscious psychological issues. The spiritual seeker’s position is distinguished from depression in that in the spiritual, there is still at least one desire active: that for liberation. If one pursues the “who am I” inquiry to the end, the idea of “staying there” will itself not make any sense.

If that is your question and you are happy with your answer, then why would I interfere?

Flow is a kind of activity-specific state that happens because of intense concentration and engagement. There is indeed no "I" in that, but the problem is precisely that it is activity-specific. It doesn't last past that period of time. The spiritual quest is to recognize is that the flow state is constant and unchanging throughout all activities -- in other words, that it is not a state at all, but it's just the way things are all the time.

It’s almost correct. The false I is hiding in this — but not where you think. It hides in the form of the doubt “what to do in this state?” Inquire into who raises that doubt... This all seems basically correct to me. But ultimately the goal of self-inquiry is to see the very one who raises these questions, and these questions and the way they are framed — all are in the dualistic world of concepts. These questions don’t occur to Beingness.

I don’t know about him particularly, but special powers, other dimensions, etc have nothing to do with the simplicity of the Self.

This is a 25-minute video I made giving a high-level overview of the search for enlightenment. Hope you find it interesting and useful. [Not sure how to embed videos but if someone wants to tell me, I'll alter my post to do that. EDIT: got it, outlandish!]

Yes, that’s certainly one way of looking at these. The other way is that these are specific other practices, often with a focus on rehearsing certain ideas and “knowledge” — thus varieties of jnana yoga. So for example you might say you have, in these six meditations: a) mindfulness of inner thoughts and feelings (just watching them nonjudgmentally), b) focusing on THOUGHTS like “I am that” and “I am c) the effortless perfection of a and b, d) watching the objects of the senses while consciously trying to disregard the name and specific form (trying to orient toward the “substance”), e) focusing on the thoughts relating the essence of those phenomena with Reality/Self, and f) the effortless perfection of d and e.

Inquire into who it is that is trying to surrender, and who it is that’s afraid. Be gentle. The other possibility is to go into your fear and really engage with and listen to it. What precisely are you afraid of and how does it make you feel? Feel that fear.

The idea of 'facets' of reality is just a conception of the mind. Enlightenment means awareness of the Self, which is perfectly simple and complete, and is beyond the idea of facets and beyond the idea of infinity. Keep it simple. All these complicated expectations are a distraction.

It has nothing to do with vampires. It's a well-known biological phenomenon. During rapid eye movement sleep your body paralyzes your muscles so you don't act out your dreams. If you that cycle is disturbed in the wrong way, you get a few moments of paralysis when you're awake.