winterknight

I don't really answer questions about 'my' experience because the answers are inevitably misleading...

I don’t really answer questions about “my” experience, since the answers are always misleading... Who says it crumbles? The so-called “invisible thought” is what is known in the eastern religions as “ignorance,” “forgetfulness,” “avarana,” “avidya,” or “maya.” It is what seems to prevent us from noticing that the “I am” occurs against a boundless backdrop. It’s just a theoretical construct, really. Search for ignorance and of course it will then be recognized that it was never the case.

Like anything else, really, life and consciousness are concepts — that is, they are language constructs built upon the illusion of a division between “I” and “other.” When the mind is in recognized silence and that separation is revealed to be wrong, the meaning of the concepts, too, must go. Maya in this context, it might be said, is the tendency to try to understand these concepts — even as illusions. Even to call them illusions or maya is in a sense to give them too much credit. When the mind is immersed in its own constant nameless silence, these questions about when the certain things are illusory or not themselves do not make sense. It isn’t that things “appear” lifeless, but that the entire concept of seeming alive or dead is wrong.

Read my guide to self-inquiry carefully and follow it.

self inquiry should be done at all waking moments, not just in sitting meditation. Sitting meditation is only useful at the very beginning, just for a little practice. And 'asking who am I' is not really anything -- self-inquiry is tracing the I feeling. Read my guide very carefully and follow it.

God is what is when you stop thinking.

Sounds like it was a glimpse of the truth. Doesn't change the need to follow the path by learning, purifying the emotions by getting therapy, etc. & doing self-inquiry. I don't speak about my own experience because it's always misleading. Enlightenment doesn't give powers or anything like that. It sounds like you need some of the basics of enlightenment -- like why you would believe in it, and what it even is. I'd recommend reading my book as a start. If you read it and have questions, let me know. Same advice to you. Get the basics of an intellectual framework. Read my book and then some other books on my recommended reading list. Giving you one-sentence answers to these kinds of massive philosophical questions here is not going to help you much.

It's spiritually significant only inasmuch as it can, for some people, quiet their minds temporarily... and maybe give them a glimpse of their underlying nature. Other than that, there's nothing extra special about 'nature' as compared to anything else. Or really, everything is nature, including culture. Humans create culture as naturally as spiders build webs. I don't understand. Can you rephrase this question?

That's hearing the notes but not the tune... Somnambulism is just one more experience state.

Well, someone else actually said that, and I said that might happen sometimes. Psychedelics give you mystical experiences, but enlightenment is not a mystical experience. Mystical experiences start and stop. They end. Enlightenment is about something that never ends, and in fact that is already the case right now. Psychoanalysis is a specific kind of therapy that helps people deal with their unconscious baggage. It quiets the mind so that you can engage in self-inquiry with more continuous focus and intensity. Understanding emotions - same deal. Otherwise your unconscious issues will keep coming up and bothering you and prevent you from inquiring.

How did you get interested in the spiritual in the first place? What do you find your biggest frustration is now?

I'm not talking about a rejection of experience or beauty. There is no one around to accept or reject.

I'm not describing a way but a fact. Percepts are also conceptual. Experience is always both. But experience is non-existent. There are no notions. There is neither humanity nor influences. There never were. There aren't now. How can something be lost which never was the case to begin with?

Not disconnection. There is nothing to be disconnected from or connected to. How true. It's really not about incorporation...

There's no highest transcendence, or levels of transcendence. That's just a trap for seekers to spend their time endlessly exercising their mind over that to avoid the truth. There's no one to embrace anything, and nothing to embrace. Identification with the embracer of experience is still identification. Nothing is cast away. Nothing is there to be cast away. There is no "God's intention." God doesn't have intentions.

It's not that my experience that is more truthful than others, but rather that I am describing what is the case for everyone in fact. Of course what I'm saying affects everything I'm saying as well. The question is: what does that mean?

It's not really looping. There's no 'it' to loop. There is no most accurate way to put it. There's no way to put it at all.

Where does he say this, out of curiosity? Do you have a video where he specifically says he is of Ramana's lineage?

Am I? Are you?

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The categories of dual and non-dual are the problems. There are no such categories. It's not that it does and it doesn't, but that language itself is meaningless.

Wrong to say because the very categories of language and thought are dependent on the illusion of separation. When those are stripped away, there is no one to say "there is experience" at all, or an experiencer, or experiencing, etc. Or, of course, a 'liberated one.'

It is, but it's the Absolute from the perspective of pure ignorance. The idea is to see that this deep sleep continues right on in waking too.

No one truly can lose sight of the real Self. Yet seekers are instructed to withdraw attention from objects. That's the seeker's paradox: to seek, knowing that what is sought is already the case. What I'm talking about is not a samadhi. What I'm talking about is simply the case at all times. This focus on a 'return to conscious life' and 'individuation' shows an incomplete understanding and/or the pull of old mental tendencies (it comes to the same thing). There was never a conscious life to begin with, nor an individual. This is the deepest secret of nonduality, and you will find this truth in certain enigmatic statements at the heart of nondual texts. "What all beings consider as day is the night of ignorance for the wise, and what all creatures see as night is the day for the introspective sage." -Gita 2:69 “ 'Since the experiences of seeing [hearing, tasting and so on] are, when experienced, the same for the liberated [as for others], and since they [the liberated] are thus experiencing the many differences which appear as a result of seeing [hearing and so on], they are experiencing non-difference [even while seeing those differences]' – to say so is wrong. The liberated one is seen as if He is also seeing the many [different] forms only in the deluded outlook of onlookers who see the many differences; but [in fact] He is not the seer [or anything at all]." -Ramana Maharshi, Guru Vachaka Kovai