The0Self

It's a transcendent happiness that you in your current state would not recognize as happiness, because there's a self that wants to feel good. They are no longer seekers because they aren't there anymore.

The only ones describing it in that way are seekers of enlightenment.

The premise of this thread is a complete misunderstanding. Near-enlightenment is like a lucid dream, but instead of running around excitedly, there's just a role and there's the absolute obviousness that anything behind that role (a person) is completely full of shit, because there is no person. Ever felt a peculiar trustworthiness and unthreatened-ness when spending time around someone who seems to experience shame a lot? It's because they are nearer to enlightenment than the average person. Enlightenment, for many, is when that feeling of being full of shit gets so all-encompassing it completely collapses. Basically cosmic suicide. No person would seek enlightenment if they knew what is was. It's the utterly complete end of good and bad, and the beginning of "is." Sound good? It actually will to some. It did to me. It actually makes sense superficially that "the end of good and bad" could somehow be "good" but of course, that's a most obvious contradiction and impossibility. I'd recommend love and consciousness. I would never recommend enlightenment. Not that enlightenment is bad, it's just not good, and therefore it's both pointless to recommend, and just altogether pointless. Nothing changes.

@Natasha Lol! Here's one: "The end of good and bad? That sure sounds good!"

Awesome. Be grateful for everything. How could you not be grateful for a true miracle? Isn't everything a true miracle? This is what takes you to the ascendant integrated whole, which is not enlightenment. Enlightenment is pointless, selflessness is powerful.

If you aren't going anywhere, it's precisely because you think you are going somewhere. There's only going inward, or not doing so. If you know there are no thoughts, that's still knowing something, so press on further. Try the inquiry Who am I? or What is knowing this? You will not find any answers, because there are none. Questions define our limitations. The question (Who am I?) defines your limitation -- you don't know who you are. The reason no answers can be found is because there is no questioner. In understanding the question, and unknowing any possible beliefs about the answer, the limitation is destroyed.

Nothing arises out of emptiness. Anything that appears to arise is not other than emptiness, which is everything. Everything isn't something, it's just everything; no-thing. There is no smaller or larger magnitude of emptiness, just emptiness. In fact, it's so damn perfectly and completely empty, there isn't even emptiness -- it's everything. Infinite boundless infinity. Whatever appears is the totality of everything, because whatever appears is emptiness, and there's nothing other than emptiness. The illusion is that it actually is as it appears -- that there's something else in it -- a person, or beyond it -- the world.

You wouldn't know them. It's possible they're just extremely selfless people, but all I'm saying is a realized person is not always identifiable by the actions people assume. They can realize that nothing is really wrong, but still have an inborn desire to donate money to an organization that they think will do good, when any leftist would generally find that organization a disgusting waste of resources and an impediment to human flourishing.

If there's memory/ego wipe, then there's no meaningful distinction between your next life, and the life of any random other person living in the world now. So if you want to be happy in a next life, make this one good, and anyone else's good. Under this paradigm, everyone's life, throughout all time, including your current life, is your next life. Identifying with your next life is exactly the same as someone else identifying with your life -- in a sense that's what's seeming to happen now.

@Someone here Of course there's no free will... Yet, reality is freely willed by God. Free will seems like free will, but it's something else. This is because reality seems like reality but it's something else. Within the dream of taking things to be exclusively real, of course.

Totally depends on your definition of thought. What you call thought I call experience. What I call thoughts, one can certainly have the experience of not having for extended periods. Meditation can go incredibly deep.

Oh yes. They can. But enlightenment is the end of glimpses.

There seems to be a body. There seems to be a here. If it seems to be real as well, that’s also just what’s apparently happening. Nobody knows it’s actually happening, or even that it’s apparently happening. It just apparently happens.

That’s a misunderstanding of enlightenment. It can’t be understood because it’s too simple to get.

When will stops, so does reality. So, reality is contingent, meaning empty. What is is only what is. What has no basis doesn’t even actually have no-basis.

It’s something I had realized as well. Though I would’ve said “the body is an experience.” It’s not actually perceived or felt because nothing is actual, only apparent. No basis or substance. Only what seems to appear. And that’s everything.

@Fran11 In a sense there isn’t free will, but there also isn’t not-free will.

If seeking-the-truth is based on fear, that’s exactly how you know it isn’t really seeking-the-truth. There’s nothing more scary than the truth. It’s death; no you.

Psychedelics don’t really provide an abiding state of enlightenment. They just give you an opportunity to have insights and increased conscious energy, for the courage and freedom to step into a higher state of consciousness. That’s not enlightenment. The enlightened inhabit the same dream state as people, but are lucid in it. In it, not of it. If you want an abiding state of enlightenment, then, well, to paraphrase Jed McKenna off the top of my head: “Ramana Maharshi’s self inquiry is the bomb. The only way ‘who am I?’ can fail to result in enlightenment is if you fail to do it. But almost nobody actually does it. The sincere practice of self inquiry would take a year or two of excruciatingly intense processing to go all the way through.“ To really do self inquiry is to set fire to your life. Not that anything will actually fall apart, but it may or may not seem to, and you have to be unconcerned with the outcome, whatever it may be. Still want enlightenment?

In one dream-story allegorical possibility, God/everything was bored with peace and contentment, so he made appearance, but everything was still boring because it all made sense and was perfect, so he imagined someone who could see it as imperfect, so that he could experience adventure, surprise, and delight, through everyone, and never be lonely. It's just a story though.

I think it’s conceivable an ego got ahold of some message but it isn’t believed here to be my ego. “We (dream characters) are the products of the dream state of the larger self. There’s no self though...“ used to be a basic summary of my understanding (plus all the bells and whistles, jhanas, etc) but it was all just very nice dream stuff. Now there’s just free fall. Don’t know what to make of it.

I’m interested in you too. There’s no suffering here, btw. At least none that means anything at all. Real talk. I guess you could call it personal enlightenment. But what would you say this (my character) knows? I don’t recognize my self as enlightened, because there is no self.

Something interesting is happening over there. I can recognize what you say somehow. Same thing happened to me, but it’s like “I” was cut out of the picture before the dream was even over. I’m sure many would call this “enlightenment.” There is still sometimes pain and even what I guess could be described as suffering (barely), but it doesn’t matter. There are still thoughts here though. What do you mean there are no thoughts? I’m suddenly interested.

I can say without a doubt there is no problem with open mindedness. What you can’t accept is that you being born out of a chicken’s egg is as valid as, well, anything else. And “you” never will. “I” never did. It didn’t matter in the end. Infinity is beyond comprehension, literally and obviously. More truth, but not really more, since there’s only all-the-truth already: comprehension is infinity.

There is no bias. No right or wrong. It’s actually unbelievable to a liberal (like “me”) that a conservative could be enlightened. They can and sometimes are. Let that fucking sink in. Read it and weep, fellow progressives. By liberal I don’t mean what Vaush calls liberal. That’s practically conservative.