mandyjw

It's a huge shock to your system to find out that this work doesn't make you happy. You realize at some point that you may have gone into it looking for the truth or for noble reasons but deep down you also wanted it to make you happy because otherwise the state you find yourself in now would not bother you. You just need to change your focus. You love life so focus on life and what you love. You can choose the thoughts you have. If you have thoughts you might as well make them happy ones. More pedestrian level advice can be a huge help. The kind of stuff we may egoically think we are above now that we've had a taste of truth. Self care. Go do something you love doing, no matter how little. Exercise. Go for a walk in nature.

Trying to compare your path to different points along the way is another distraction. An extremely compelling distraction we all fall into, yes, but a distraction nonetheless. Comparison is judgement, judgement is thought, thought is the illusion you're trying to see through. There's just this moment, be aware now.

@now is forever Future hope of salvation if you do the right things. Sounds like every other dogmatic religion on earth.

@Mikael89 Your personality is just a belief. Believe what you want, they are all false anyway. Don't you realize the power of this?

That's why you can only seek awakening and not enlightenment. Enlightenment doesn't exist. If you define awakening as an experience that's all that exists.

@Shin A one sided awakening isn't a full awakening. It's maintaining certain dualities while dissolving others.

@DrewNows I guess so. I mean everyone is their own manifestation of life in their own way with their own imbalances. I'm not sure how you can be one with your body and all others and also abuse both to that extent. So I think it's safe to say enlightened people are loving and seem somewhat boring to the untrained eye.

How many of you would be sold on enlightenment if the first thing you heard about it was the idea that you'd be able to sit all day and do nothing and find as great joy helping an old man cross the road than winning the lottery. Well SIGN ME UP for that shit. This is why almost only old people listen to Eckhart Tolle.

@SQAAD Yes, I wouldn't call it enlightenment exactly but cherry picking powerful truths can make people seem enlightened and even more than that really enigmatic. I think that truly enlightened people seem really boring almost all of the time.

You need your ego to function in life, the know the difference between you and your refrigerator you need an ego. The same would be true for any society, you would need some structure to allow people to work and live together.

You are God, God can't stop you from being enlightened because she's you. There, you're enlightened. You no longer have a personality. That was easy.

@Mikael89 The universe- "Look at all this beauty, magic and aliveness! I made it for you. Just for you and only you, you're the only you that exists. You can be do and have anything you could ever want and dream, because you already are enlightened and fulfilled this very moment." Mikael - "Meh."

Sure that's really how it is, but that's no fun. God wanted to have a good time playing rock, paper, scissors so he created duality. That's why we have the ego, so we can forget that we aren't really separate and have a good time. The ego is a beautiful thing. Once you realize what it is and don't let it run the whole show of course.

@tecladocasio It has everything to do with awareness, or consciousness might be a better word. And it both is and is not a state. At a point these discussions become completely nonsensical, because every single word you can choose is of course NOT IT. For example you just created a duality between your conceptualization of ego and enlightenment, true and false. NOT IT. My head hurts. I need to go stare out the window in my enlightened state. lol

@Neorez Because you can only create your reality when you are conscious of the fact that it's not really real. When you think it's real you can't create it. There is no truth. That's the ultimate truth. Just focus on what you want. Reality is love and light and beauty if you focus on those things and manifest them. Or it's dark and nothing and meaningless if you focus on that, you'll manifest more of that. Your focus is all that there is. You keep wanting someone to tell you what life is really like, what truth is really like. You've disregarded the world of form as the truth, you've recognized that's not it. But you're still looking to teachers to paint you a new conceptualization of what it's REALLY like. There's no truth. There's no ground for you to stand on. There's no such thing. Just you and this moment. Feel whatever you want to feel. ' I choose love, beauty and light. You can choose whatever you want.

No one who is enlightened can ever really claim to be enlightened without being the devil. Because that means they took their eye of their dark side and denied it. Which means that's what's actually driving and controlling them.

@tecladocasio I can be enlightened, I can be a psychopath and I can be a self-conscious ego depending on my state of awareness at any given moment. I am nothing but a carrier of potential for none and all manifestations of ego including it's absence. You must know that you are capable of the dark side in order to choose the light side. Both are always with you.

So Jed had something to teach you. What do the other 7.53 billion people who are also manifestations of God have to teach you? You found just one aspect of the truth. One facet to the diamond. Why are you so drawn to the depressing, dark aspects? What is there in you that seeks out these teachings? Your experience of the truth can be whatever you want it to be. You're creating it. If it's not what you want that's on you to change it.

@Shin I'm sure you've experienced moments of enlightenment in meditation or life. Would you have been capable of harming another person or following through on an addiction in those moments of connection and awareness? In those moments would you not have felt yourself as completely one with anyone else around you, or if not around you would have felt no awareness of their existence other than a prevailing connection of love with life? Would you have felt any lack whatsoever that would make you seek out some substance? If enlightenment is a perpetual state of being and no self, either these people aren't enlightened or we have to redefine out terms and say everyone is enlightened. Of course Nahm is right, no one is enlightened except you. Paradoxically everyone is enlightened. That means stop caring about Osho or any guru you think is enigmatic, go visit some old person in a nursing home or go into hospice care and spend time with ordinary people without wanting anything whatsoever from them, and having absolutely no expectations whatsoever and you'll get far more out of it. The idea of a master or guru is an egoic projection. Every single person you encounter is a teacher because the teacher and student are one.

Psychopathy and enlightenment share a lot of characteristics. Part of the work of deconstructing the ego is realizing that in a way, only you exist, in a way, only your perceptions are real, there is no good and bad and you learn to go about your path and not care what other people think. If you practice and integrate those realizations without understanding the paradoxical flip side of them, you'll be a self made psychopath. The psychopath only cares about himself and so to realize that he's a psychopath he has to acknowledge the existence of others. So he proclaims himself a god, or master. Enlightenment is an experience of love and connection, enlightenment is the pure essence of love itself. Anyone who does not act out of love is caught in the mind. Anyone who tries to sell you a future hope of salvation and tells you are not worthy as you are right now of the kingdom of god is a false teacher.

@Shin Are you saying that someone can be enlightened and still completely blind to unenlightened or even extremely damaging social constructs?

The true part of you is but you split yourself so you aren't FULLY in the now. The now is not a concept. Enlightenment is not a concept. The experience is the thing.

You can conceptualize the present moment, just like past and future never exist as anything BUT concepts. To fully experience the present moment, there is no thought, not self. That's all enlightenment is. Just do that. When you stop doing it and feel pain, you know you fell back into thought and then go do it again. That's all there is. This work is not special in any way. I've run into old people who are 99% enlightened without knowing what the hell any of these concepts are or giving any thought to whether their brain actually exists or whether it's only a concept or whether or not if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it that it makes no sound. People did this all the time in the past without knowing what it was. Now that we have technology and have sped up thought so much we have to work harder and have to have exciting concepts like enlightenment and gurus to emulate to give us motivation.

@Truth Addict Suffering happens in your mind. A lot of it is future expectation of suffering. When you identify with the mind or with suffering you aren't in the now.

@Truth Addict If not now, when?