mandyjw

Love does not say how I should or should not behave but you're telling me how I should think about love. Do you want to have the upper hand when it comes to love? Do you not want to surrender to all of it's many forms to know it's depth fully? You're like a kid at Easter who won't eat his Easter bunny because he thinks it's mean and wants to keep it forever. It's chocolate. It was made for you to eat. I have something you don't have. You have something I don't have.

Affect with the real thing is the point of the illusion. great love cannot exist or know itself without duality and illusion. It's fucking beautiful. Step back into the illusion, forget who you are and remember. It's the dance of life. You preach, not, it, not it, not it. You have a promise of future heaven and salvation. THIS IS IT. Illusion and everything. Surrender to the illusion. It's the last thing you won't surrender too.

@David Hammond But you don't stay in your vehicle when you get to your destination. Oh good! I finally made it to the Grand Canyon! I'll just stay in the car.

That's not self-realization. That's selling your soul to the devil, (complete and total identification with self). That is not awakening, it is complete and total commitment to one side of the paradox.

My dog.

Everyone watched Breaking Bad and wants to be the Walter White of spirituality. You guys don't want to be enlightened, you want be be some bad ass, that's why you guys love Osho so much.

@FoxFoxFox I see the truth in what you're saying, but I think we are arguing both sides of a paradox again. Here's an example. Before I knew how to love unconditionally I went around the world and saw the world and other people as how it was for me and what they could do for me. I felt compassion and love but they were not unconditional. I would put myself in severe states of suffering by reading about wars in africa and thought that I should fight wrong in the world. After learning how to love without conditions I see love in people all the time and I see people who are cut off from the ego. I can't clearly receive love from someone who is cut of by ego but I can give love as long as I don't let my own ego be triggered. There are these people who suddenly come up and are so striking to you...people you always overlooked before. It's like Jesus reincarnated in your elderly neighbor. Or the janitor you wave to everyday who never showers. And they just emit this unconditional love for everyone and when you meet it's like a knowing and a merging of souls. And it's like these people exist to show you how you're supposed to love. And you realize that all your close relationships have ego filters both in you and in them. And every time your ego is triggered you know it was a mirror and that it was always your ego that was triggered. And so we need other people to grow and they need us, because the entire world is becoming enlightened. It's not you. It was never you. That's why you can't turn your back on people, or say that there are levels of awakening. It's all you. It's a paradox that we are separate but we are together. You must honor and live each side of the paradox to know the whole.

The thing about doors is that you can walk out them and then back in again at will. I didn't forget where the door is.

How is complete and total ego death and enlightenment not the same as physical death. Don't you need some semblance of ego or sense of separateness to survive as a form?

Oh wow. That's something I feel but never really understood or could explain. My Grandmother died a couple weeks ago and that describes exactly how I felt about her death. If there was a person who unconditionally loved me it was her. Mourning her death was like a full understanding of how much I loved her and how much she had loved me and realizing that that love was the love of the universe and my/our very essence. @DrewNows Thank you. That was really good.

You can only embody unconditional love post awakening. It's like when Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself. No dualistic Christian could actually do that, that verse was terribly frustrating to try to obey. Then you study Buddhism or some non dual teaching and you learn on a deep level that your neighbor IS YOURSELF.

Someone who abuses their child is cut off from love by the ego though.

@Leo Gura If you perceive levels of awakening, you are currently at all of those levels at the same time.

But Joseph. Sometimes I just don't FEEL like it. So I don't.

Well this is not what I was expecting. Can I send it back for a replacement, I think mine's broken?

I know, one must learn to loving that groundless feeling. But we're constantly getting bored with it, trying to understand it, coming here to discuss it knowing that everything we say isn't it, pointing out that fact whenever anyone else does the same thing and getting into fights. Over and over and over. We might as well admit that we just really, really enjoy fighting with each other.

Joseph = Jesus. Got it. Jesus Joseph, did you know that you are your own Father?

But Jesus said I could be wise and build my house upon the rock instead of sand. SO WHERE'S THE GODDAMN ROCK PEOPLE? YOU SAID YOU THERE WAS A ROCK.

@Joseph Maynor I did all this work so that I could forgive Christians and be grateful for those experiences but I still can't forgive people for holding on to dogma in this community. Including myself. OH SAVE ME JESUS.

I feel the same way. I has honored/cursed with the experience of being completely immersed in the disasters of fundamental Christianity from a very young age. I spent my entire childhood trying to reconcile the things from Jesus that hit home and the experiences of God I knew were real when I spent time in nature, and all the dogma I was fed as truth.

You act like God when you have concepts about God and how he should act, ego. You identify (are) God when you let go of concepts about anything, egoless.

It's an easy trap to fall in unless you were religious yourself. I wonder if it's a necessary stage.

You're to credit for that!

I admit that I have a lot of beliefs and that they are all worthless.

Ah. I like it.