Moksha

God experiences nothing in ultimate reality, but it experiences everything in creation. The cosmos is a sequence of experiences, evolving toward self-realization, which is the most sublime state within the dream. It is the paradoxical limbo moment which is the pinnacle, when the eyes of God flutter open, but the dream has not entirely faded. The seer and the seen dissolve into the singularity that is God. What else could this be?

Suffering is only necessary until it serves its purpose?Instead of resisting it, allow its energy to flow through you freely. It will burn away your attachments, and show you the secret of yourself. Bonfire of Me Suffering strikes the spark of my undoing, Catching in the kindling of thought, Consuming self to soot, intensifying, Crumbling the fortress that I wrought, Purifying fire ever rising, Burning through the ropes of my desire, Devouring the karma of my making, Soul wind stirring these flames higher, Scattering the ashes of my ego, No illusion left, only the fire.

Suffering serves the deepest purpose. It is the inferno which drives you away from the mind and back to yourself. Psychedelics and meditation may provide poignant insights into your nature, but only suffering gives you the will to actualize those insights. Spiritual curiosity alone is not enough.

You could say all dreams are empty, but then why did you create them? Lucid dreaming is the highest adventure, but still it is only a dream.

Suffering can serve as either a blessing or a curse. It is a sword pointed at your heart, and you have the choice of how to respond. Most grasp the blade and desperately try to shove it away, without understanding that resistance only bloodies them more. Few realize that fighting against the present moment is self-defeating, and instead choose to allow the energy of the experience to pass through them. They are cleansed and deepened in the process. Seeing clearly brings them closer to their true self. Suffering is the ultimate solvent. If you allow it, suffering dissolves your attachments. It teaches you not to identify with the phenomenal world, as if it has the ability to give you meaning beyond who you actually are. Life can be enjoyed, and even celebrated, but the moment you cling to it or resist it, you will return to the school of suffering for another semester.

I have stood in a place surrounded by mirrors. When you look at a mirror in front of you, it reflects not only you, but the reflection in the mirror behind you, and so on into a seeming infinity of reflections. I saw the same as a kid, when I dreamed that I dreamed that I was dreaming. Creation is the concentric gaze moving outward beyond each reflection, and realization is the eccentric gaze receding from each reflection until it is entirely refocused on itself.

What do you mean by THIS? If you are referring to the cosmos and everything within it, it is limited by its nature. For example, consider its age. The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion year ago, so light has only had that much time to travel. The cosmos is currently 93 billion light-years in diameter. Most scientists believe it will eventually reach the limit of its expansion in 65 million years, and collapse upon itself in the Big Crunch. Mystics have realized the same expansion and collapse of the cosmos, millennia before scientists did. If by THIS you are referring to ultimate reality, which is beyond the cosmos, it has no dualistic attributes including creation/destruction, transience/intransience, and form/formlessness.

All forms are transient. Whatever is created must eventually die. Call it the Law of Dualities. The stick always has two ends. Beyond time is beyond the dualities of birth and death. All created things are transitory; those who realize this are freed from suffering. This is the path that leads to pure wisdom. - Dhammapada 20:277

Truth can only be known at the level it exists. In the cosmos, reality is relative. There are no absolutes on the cosmic stage. Do you know of any? Space, time, matter, energy, and motion are all defined from the perspective of the observer. Einstein saw it. Science is a powerful tool for comprehending relative truth, but it cannot prove anything higher than itself. To realize absolute truth requires absolute evidence. Where would this evidence come from? Clearly, not from relative facts. It is only possible from the absolute. You ask for unique value. The closest you can come to that is the appearance of unique value, when the essence of the absolute realizes itself within a particular form. But the uniqueness of the form is only an appearance. If ultimate reality is seamless and unchanging, how can anything be unique? Only the appearance of distinction is possible. When the absolute is realized, boundaries disappear. Even self-realization is only an appearance, but it is the closest comprehension possible to ultimate reality. The final step of enlightenment is letting go of the idea of enlightenment, after first having attained it. I wholeheartedly agree that life is here to be experienced and enjoyed. It is amazing to contemplate the evolution of forms during the 13.7 billion years of the cosmos. Each step of the evolutionary process has been experiential and therefore purposeful, but ultimately the direction has been toward developing the capacity for self-awareness. You could say that experience is the immediate purpose of creation, and self-realization is its final purpose. With every mass extinction on the planet, life has returned at a higher level of consciousness than preceded it. When the highest level is reached, the game is over and everything begins again. This process is realized by mystics in every spiritual tradition. As Aldous Huxley summarized: The Perennial Philosophy appears in every age and civilization: There is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change This same reality lies at the core of every personality The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially, that is, to realize God while here on earth So what is the catch that keeps Consciousness/God/Brahman from instantly realizing itself, and thus solving the riddle before it has the opportunity to experience it? The proof can only be directly realized, and at least on this planet, this realization has only recently become possible in the briefest blink of an eye. The vastness of creation stretches backward, far beyond what any mind can conceive. Do you grok 14 billion years? I wish there was a way to directly show you, but like anyone else, I can only point to the reality which is beyond you and me, and the essence of us both. Neti neti will get you there, and if it doesn't, suffering will. Although it is described in all traditions, the Hindu tradition is as close as any I've seen. As with every tradition, there is the surface interpretation, which is relatively meaningless, and there is the deep interpretation, which attempts to describe the ultimate. In Hindu myth, a Day of Brahma is a period of explosive expansion aka the Big Bang, where prakriti are divided into gunas. Each Day lasts for 1,000 yugas, which equals 4,320,000,000 years. It is not literally true, but when you look at the deeper meaning it resonates: The Day of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas and the Night of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas. When the day of Brahma dawns, forms are brought forth from the Unmanifest; when the night of Brahma comes, these forms merge in the Formless again. This multitude of beings is created and destroyed again and again in the succeeding days and nights of Brahma. But beyond this formless state there is another, unmanifested reality, which is eternal and is not dissolved when the cosmos is destroyed. You are asking the most important question, which is who you are. Now go and find out

It seems you have already begun the Neti Neti journey, by questioning and discarding whatever cannot be known. When you have tunneled through the conceptual debris that you have piled upon yourself, none of which is true, at the center you will realize yourself. The character is an extension of the coder, in the same way a ray of light is an extension of the sun. You could say it is the sun, but not all of the sun. The essence of the character beyond the pixels that form its shape, is the coder, but not all of the coder. One knows the coder is within the code through direct realization. It is the only knowledge possible within the game, the resonance of the coder awakening within the character, and tracing its essence back to its origin. The entire video game is the creation of the coder, and the purpose of the game is fulfilled when the coder realizes itself watching it through the screen.

Welcome, @Patang. It's funny how the hero returns home at the end of a treacherous journey, realizing that the treasure he so courageously sought and fought for is already within. Then again, had he known then what he knows now, there never would have been an adventure to begin with ?⚔️?

Hope this is helpful. I came across it earlier today, from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj: The seeker is he who is in search of himself. Give up all questions except one: "Who am I?" After all, the only fact you are sure of is that you are. The "I am" is certain. The "I am this" is not. Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are, you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not -- body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that -- nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being. You seem to be realizing intuitively that ultimate reality cannot be described. God, and every other word, inevitably falls short. People sometimes fall into conceptual traps because they don't realize this. At best, the mind can only say what reality is not. You see your true nature through direct realization. When it happens, you realize that it is beyond any beliefs, words, or spiritual texts. As the Upanishads say, "Words turn back frightened." I like your video game analogy. The key for the character is to realize the coder is within its code, but the coder is not confined to its code. After awakening, what you perceive is you, but you are not all that you perceive. For some reason, I'm on an Einstein kick this week. As he said: Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.

@Nilsi Feel free to criticize Leo's teachings, but personal remarks about him or any other member of the forum are inflammatory and unnecessary. Renunciation is a proven spiritual path in both eastern and western traditions, but it is only a path. There are other paths to the summit, and regardless of the path taken, it is no longer helpful once the summit is reached. Seeing truly frees you to fully engage with the phenomenal beauty of life, without being entangled by it. Sometimes people benefit from sitting in the solitude of a cave for a while, until they are ready to emerge with rested eyes. The only people judging them for doing so are blindly chained to their own wall within the cave.

It is the seeing of the seer, the almost avatar whose eyes perceive the formations of phenomenal reality but whose light arises from the infinite well of itself.

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There is a third way of "thinking", beyond disidentification from involuntary and wandering thoughts. It is purposeful creation that is born of your ultimate nature, and is directed toward a specific goal. You don't know in advance what the answer will be, but you focus awareness on the question without imposing thought. In the silent sanctum of pure mind, a solution arises. This is how Einstein, who was a poor student but also a brilliant mystic, realized relativity. Words and language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any part in my thought processes. The psychological entities that serve as building blocks for my thought are certain signs or images, more or less clear, that I can reproduce and recombine at will.

God can be a triggering term, especially for people raised in a fundamentalist religion that ensnared them within a crystallized belief system. I avoided using it for a long time, but find myself returning to it as a pointer to the miraculous and mysterious nature of life. Enlightenment is letting go of all identifications, including identification with the concept of God. It's the Neti, Neti approach to inner realization, where each layer that is not you is peeled away like the skin of an onion, until only the unnamed essence remains. You can enjoy the benefits of this wisdom, as it seems you have, without needing to conceptualize it. Whether it is called God-Realization or simply Realization doesn't matter. The litmus test of your insights is the extent to which they motivate you to release phenomenal addictions, and not only allow but celebrate the universe flowing through you.

Meditation is not anti-thinking. To the contrary, it develops the discipline for proactive thinking. Most of us are entangled by our thoughts, as if they define our ultimate nature. When you are centered in awareness, you no longer identify with your thoughts, but are able to direct them with intelligence and creativity far beyond what was possible before. That is what I meant earlier about killing the elephant vs. learning to ride it where you want to go. The brain is an amazing beast when it is tamed. All true creatives, including Einstein, understand how to operate from this inner space of mystery which is who you actually are. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. - Einstein

I didn't start meditating until after awakening, but better late than never

Creation is the appearance of dualities. Within relative reality, all attributes have extremes, including joy and suffering. Each extreme necessitates its opposite. For God to experience pleasure, it must also experience pain. In its ultimate state, God is beyond attributes. It doesn't appreciate or not appreciate. Nor is it any kind of -ism, which are ideologies built from beliefs. God is Love. Not the phenomenal emotion, but the unconditional seamlessness beyond the dream.

Guilt is one of the ego's favorite weapons. It is guaranteed to keep you trapped within your mind. Not only is it unnecessary, it sabotages your ability to be in harmony with your ultimate nature. It is amazing to spend so many years flailing yourself for faults, only to realize that tossing the scourge into the fire is the truest path to freedom.

Recognizing thought patterns is the first step toward disidentifying from them. Rather than thinking about what you are thinking about, observe the thoughts without judgment. Eventually, they subside and become a murmur compared to the cacophony they used to be.

Meditation isn’t about killing the elephant, but about learning to ride it where you want to go.

Morality is not about judgment, which is the relentless hell of the conditioned mind. That doesn't mean actions have no consequences. Whatever stone you cast creates ripples, which return to you in kind. If you want happiness, live in harmony with the conditions that create it.

Here, I believe we are talking about the same thing. Your description of seeing a tree without labeling it is a good example. When you let go of the mind's insatiable craving to identify, differentiate, and judge it is easier to see the sameness of your ultimate nature in all beings, even in a tree. You are asking whether this seeing is pragmatic. It is, to the extent that it informs your approach in life. If you try to shape the universe to your will, you will continue binding yourself to misery. If you release obsessive attachments to desires and fears, and allow the energy of the universe to flow through you as the gift that it is, you are on the path to freedom.