jjer94

Hi Chaitali, I find it kind of contradictory that in your first point you say don't use logic, but everything you said up to that point are logical perspectives. My opinion: I suggest following your first point and your first point only. While you're at it, see if you can prove to yourself why all of your other statements are not true. Cheers, JJ

Here's something for you to contemplate on your own: "Anytime you’re practicing renunciation, you’re deluded. How about that! You’re deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce... The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands." -Tony de Mello Cheers!

You may find it hard to talk about this kind of stuff with others without them lashing out at you. That's what I meant when I said that it may difficult to relate to others. It's best to keep all of this enlightenment stuff to yourself unless people ask genuinely about it. Like a vampire who doesn't pass the threshold until he is invited inside. Also, on a fundamental level, you will be in a totally different "paradigm" where relatedness doesn't really apply anymore. In the average egoic conversation, relating to each other consists of reflecting back each others beliefs, reinforcing their own delusions. Enlightenment removes all of those beliefs, so having a conversation feels more like a fun little dance of words rather than an I-have-to-say-the-right-things ordeal. Your communication will be more honest, unhindered by egoic filters, and you will take it less seriously. Oddly enough, by removing these filters, you naturally encourage the other person to remove theirs as well, and you may connect even better. Connection in this case is not relatedness; I would describe it more as synergy. Sorry to say this, but love as you currently believe it to be is no more than your attachment to the prejudiced ideas you have about a person. You may not really feel that sort of love anymore after enlightenment. In my opinion, when all the spiritual teachers talk about love, what they're really talking about is radical unconditional acceptance of everything as it is. It's a sense of complete openness and vulnerability. In summary, your relationship with others will inevitably change after enlightenment. You may lose some relationships because you used them to fuel your ego, and you may even lose what you call "love" for others. However, relationship will become more open and authentic, and in my opinion, that's a much better place to be than the egoic perspective.

Ask yourself why you feel so inclined to play in the first place, and go deeper and deeper with it. Set a timer at certain increments while you're playing. When it goes off, stop and observe yourself. I'll use my situation as an example, but don't try to relate it with your experience. You have to contemplate on your own because you have your own personal reasons for doing what you do. Be as honest as you possibly can. Why do I play? -> Because it's fun -> Because it's fun to progress in levels and get new loot -> Is it really? What's the point of getting new loot? -> So I can be the best in the game -> So actually you're playing for an ideal in the future and not for the actual game. -> Yes. Video gaming has actually start to become a chore, now that I think about it. -> Childhood: addicted to video games. Why? -> My parents didn't let me play on weekdays, making me have a strong desire to play as much as I could on weekends -> Why did I want to play so much? -> I had feelings of unworthiness in childhood due to other kids calling me names -> Video games allowed me to be someone else and become more powerful than I ever could be in real life -> Parents forced me to make friends and call them up -> socializing became an obligation rather than a natural want -> Stronger desire to play video games -> Family shunned me for playing so much -> I felt even more unworthy -> Stronger desire to feel worth by playing more video games... And so on. By understanding the origins of your addiction and why you value video games so much, you will naturally begin to become less neurotic about them.

What do you think is easier: being fast asleep in a nice, warm bed or having to strip the bedsheets and get out of bed? It's easier to stay asleep because it's familiar, it's warm, it's cozy, and in your dreams there is still hope for a better tomorrow. Even if you already wet the bed and smell like crap, that's not nearly as painful as getting out of bed altogether and having to face the light of day.

My eyes glazed over after the first five sentences. You're theorizing about enlightenment when there's nothing to theorize about. Why this reality? Why anything? Because. All of this is mind-stuff. You've had your fun theorizing, but now it's time to throw it all away; that is, of course, if you're seeking Truth.

In my opinion, the way you know you're in H/A is if you've had a grounded experience that you are not the ego. You may have also found the "I AM," which is that sentient emptiness that pervades sense perceptions. Here's Jed's benchmark: "If you are free to do or not do anything you feel like, then you have reached H/A. Which you are anyways, but keep lying to yourself that you are not." It's interesting you mention death, because I've noticed a general trend with seekers: the most serious ones have been in the closest contact with death.

Matter is a concept we use in tandem with atoms, molecules, and space. What's actually there is just sense perceptions and sentience...but even those are concepts. A concept is essentially an invention that comes from the mind. Concepts are illusions, for they appear to exist when they actually do not. Another word for concept is story. When you watch a movie, does the story or content of the movie actually exist? No; it's just sounds and some light projected onto a screen. Enlightenment is the realization of Absolute Truth. Absolute Truth is Absolute, meaning that it's True for eternity: True before you were born, True now, and True after you die. It's not that Absolute Truth is "possible"; it's that it never left. It's always been here. Enlightenment is a direct encounter with that fact. You can't comprehend the Absolute Truth by mind, nor is it an experience; but you can become aware or conscious that Truth is. That's really the only way I can describe it. It's like how you know when you've orgasmed during sex: you just know.

Yes, this is a very common trap that people get into after reading Jed's books. He's very eloquent with his words, which makes it that much worse. In his books, he uses his own life circumstances as an example of post-enlightenment. He considers himself akin to a vampire, unable to connect with humans anymore, vagabonding around, doing a whole lot of nothing besides writing the books. Also, he talks about what he did to arrive at Truth: he quit his job, cut all ties with friends and family, and holed himself up in a secluded house for two years. In the second book, he uses Julie as a prime example of someone in the process. She's basically psychotic, holed up in a cabin writing for hours and hours on end, living on energy bars. In his books, Jed almost makes it seem like you have to be a raving lunatic to become enlightened. What most people don't get is that this is just a perspective. While Jed's cut-all-ties-be-depressed method is straight to the point, it's not the only way to become enlightened. There is no one path you have to take to become enlightened. There are so many ways to see through illusions. You don't have to cut all ties and be depressed to become enlightened, although being monomaniacal does accelerate the process. I actually did that for a while last summer. I holed myself up in my apartment, lost all of my friends except for one who I barely talked to. I avoided my parents and my brothers at all costs. I was even considering dropping out of college and running away so nobody would ever find me. I sat in my room, writing and contemplating for hours and hours on end, expecting to get somewhere. My breaks consisted of hour-long bike rides. I had several awakenings from doing this, but I was also doing it out of fear. I was running away from social interaction because of my long-held social fears, and I was using the Spiritual Autolysis/Contemplation as an excuse to avoid everyone. I was using Jed's books as a way to entrench myself further in ego, to don the "hermit-that's-too-deep-for-everyone" costume. That's another trap to watch out for if you're taking the monomaniacal path. Yes, the process to enlightenment is inherently painful. It feels like parts of you are dying every time you see through your beliefs. And in a way, it is a sort of slow dying. Fundamentally, it is pointless, but so is everything else. I would consider enlightenment itself life-negative since you're waking up from the dream. However, I would consider post-enlightenment life-affirming. Post-enlightenment is where you realize you have nowhere to go except for back in the dream. That's where "the mountain becomes a mountain again." That's where you can't help but love and embrace everything (even if you're a hermit), the good and the bad, because you are all of it. That's where flow, manifestation, and effortless functioning comes in. That's where work becomes play. That's where you're no longer afraid of anything or concealing any parts of your life. That's where the "authentic self" begins to sprout, since you've released the illusion of control. Yes, technically, you can stop at the "I AM" (Human Adulthood - waking up in the dream) and have those same benefits. But when I stopped at H/A, I had an irresistible nagging to go even further. I can imagine anyone stopping at H/A would feel the same way. I've written a lot already, and I could go on even more on this topic, but I just want to end with a disclaimer. I am not saying Jed's books are awful. In fact, I found them to be the most useful and entertaining books for me on the journey, and I would suggest any serious seekers to read them. I am only saying, be careful about taking his or any other spiritual teacher's (OR MY) words too seriously and copying what he does. "When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

Don't think so. Know so!

I didn't mean to make contentment sound like an emotional state. It's just a constant background feeling that happens after enlightenment. You will still feel excitement and sadness, all the ups and downs, but you won't resist them or take them seriously anymore. That allows you to experience each and every emotion fully. In the egoic paradigm, you resist the bad emotions and cling to the good ones, which causes you to store emotions and create obstructions in your life. It's like hanging on to a rock in a stream while the water is slapping your face. Quite painful, really. Flow is the state of being so present during an activity that it feels effortless. An illusion is something that appears to exist but really doesn't, while reality is what's actually there. Most people live in illusion and believe that these illusions are real. The biggest illusion of them all is the ego. Like Santa Clause, you can never actually find an "ego" in your experience. The ego is like a phantom that lurks in the thoughts and haunts the body; it doesn't actually exist. You kind of have to believe that there is such thing as enlightenment in order to start the journey.

In my opinion, yes, very much so. Even if you live life in the aforementioned way, you will still take life seriously when things get bad. You can't help it. Also, you still may be in the mode of "riding the rides" to attain happiness instead of riding them because you are happy. The happiness I'm talking about is a contentment, a feeling of completeness. After enlightenment, contentment is your natural state. No matter how crappy life gets circumstantially, your contentment doesn't waver. You also will be able to differentiate illusion from reality, which can be very helpful for taking things less seriously. There are a whole bunch of other reasons why enlightenment may be worth it to you, including but not limited to: flow, manifesting authentic desires, emotional mastery, and overwhelming gratitude that comes in waves.

Space is a concept. Who you really are is not a concept

First off, you may want to supplement that meditation with self-inquiry. Watch Leo's "How to be Enlightened" video for more info on that. You have this idea in your head that enlightenment, i.e. Truth, is some transcendent realm that's somehow apart from the "reality" that you talk about. It's not. Truth is not an experience, but it's not apart from experience. It's not some place you go to either; who you are is Truth itself. To say that it's impossible to spend all time in Truth, when you are Truth, is a contradiction you may want to contemplate. It's not a "step above" reality either. The reality you think of as reality is not actually reality, and the real reality is Truth. You can never leave Truth. It's not depressing at all to come back to what you call "reality." In fact, it's incredibly liberating when you realize you are not anything ephemeral like the body. That makes life into more of a play, a game, than a serious ordeal. You're finally free to do whatever you feel like doing regardless of what others say. You can finally make the most out of your life while it lasts. Yes, you may not relate to most people anymore, but you can't help but love everyone and everything. You realize that everything is pointless, not only the lower stuff, but the pursuit of enlightenment itself. And you can only smile in gratitude at it all. "Look where we are! We're in eternity's carnival. You can do anything; ride any ride, play any game, do whatever you want. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you shall pop like a snot bubble. It's not a prison of hopelessness and despair, it's a magnificent carnival with free admission and no rules. You can't stay forever, but you're here now, all shiny and new and ready to make a great big mess. Surely you can set aside your infantile need for meaning and just play." - Jed McKenna

I doubt it's because of the cheat days. Let me give you an analogy... The hydra. You've heard of that mythical beast, haven't you? It's ferocious, gets in your face, and is hard to kill because it has multiple heads. You can try slicing its heads off with a dagger, but they grow back if you stop slicing them off. That's pretty frustrating! The only way to kill the hydra is by stabbing it in the heart with your awesome sword. The hydra is who you think you are, the ego. Its heads are the thought-stories you weave day-in and day-out. Meditation is the equivalent of the dagger. While you can temporarily maim the hydra, its heads will just grow back, and the thought-stories will return. You've been meditating for a year now, and you've noticed little progress towards mental stability. That's probably because you've only been chopping the heads off and forgot about that awesome sword you have.... What's the awesome sword? Awareness. The process of becoming aware is the process of understanding you, the character, Melanie. What are her desires? Why does she desire that? Why is she so angry at the moment? Is she afraid? What agenda is she trying to accomplish with this particular emotion? By understanding yourself through the sword of awareness, you will stab the hydra in the heart and the heads will start dying naturally. Awareness is not trying to fix Melanie; it's just trying to understand Melanie and what makes her tick. I suggest you supplement meditation with awareness. Practice it all the time, on and off the cushion; life is your meditation now. Life is your spiritual practice. Any time you feel emotional pain is an opportunity to learn more about Melanie, and in the process, kill more and more of the hydra. If you want more of a how-to on how to practice awareness, I suggest reading the book Awareness by Tony de Mello. All the best, Melanie! P.S. You don't need earplugs or a quiet space for meditation.

Leo would say do it daily if you want the full effects, and I'd agree with that... for the most part. If you're really truly into meditation, you'd find a way to do it despite your circumstances. Maybe there's a park near your flat where you can do it on a bench, or some field where you can sit in the grass. There are more options than you think. Don't worry about missing days of meditation. I wouldn't beat yourself up about it. And while you're at this crossroads, maybe now would be a good time to reflect over what you've gotten out of meditation and why you're doing it. Are you doing it for stress reduction? Relaxation? Health benefits? Or are you doing it for enlightenment work? Just stuff to consider.

Enlightenment, or Truth, has nothing to do with life experiences. How can you threaten a Truth that was never born and doesn't die? If I misinterpreted your question and you're instead wondering if it's possible to become unenlightened...Yes, to a certain extent. Once you see the Truth, you can't unsee it, but you can cover it up by re-identifying with ego. After you have an awakening, it is very natural to fall back asleep into old conditioning. When you wake up after so many years of being fast asleep, you'll be feeling groggy. You'll want to fall back asleep into the illusion of security of what's familiar: your warm bed. You may even do so for a while. But once you've had an awakening, it's near impossible to fall back asleep permanently. You will naturally start taking off bed sheets and your pajamas...and then finally roll out of bed. You know the comfort from the bed is an illusion, and you will instead want to live in what's really there, which is awakedness. Survival instincts have little to do with awakening. Those are programmed responses that we don't have much control over. If you touch a hot pan, you will naturally recoil. If you're stuck in a burning house, you will want to get the heck out of there. Of course, there are exceptions. In the end, it doesn't matter how you deal with life-threatening situations. What does matter is that you've "sucked the marrow out of life" while you're still alive and well, and enlightenment allows you to suck the bone dry.

I edited my map to reflect this point. Thanks for mentioning that. @shouldnt My map was very misleading due to the phrase "full enlightenment". Forget about what I said before. You can still be fully aligned with Truth and play the human game. I edited my post so that you can get a clearer picture.

How long? Of course you could say it takes no time since time doesn't exist, but that doesn't really help answer your question. On a practical level, how long it takes depends on how deluded you are: how full your cup is. If your cup is the size of an oil tanker and the drain-hole is small, it'll take a long-ass time to empty that cup. You may not even want to bother. This is often the case with senile old people who entrenched themselves in ego at an early age and dug themselves into a massive hole. This can even be the case with people who consider themselves spiritual that have meditated for 30+ years expecting enlightenment but haven't gotten there because they still believe all of the garbage their teachings tell them. If your cup holds 8 oz of clean water, then emptying that cup would be a breeze. This is often the case for young people who caught themselves early on, or for people who never really believed in much to begin with. Depression usually helps to accelerate the disillusionment process. Of course, you also have to keep in mind that after enlightenment, there will often still be plenty of deprogramming to do, which can take months to several years to work through. As you can probably see, I can't give you an exact time frame for how long it takes. It's different for everyone. You also don't realize how full your cup is until you've actually looked for yourself. Hopefully that clears things up a little for you...?

Dear Captain America, Before you start any self-actualization/enlightenment work, I suggest you first deal with the more pressing issues in your life, such as your finances. How can a superhero become self-actualized when he's struggling to get food on the table? No sense in putting the cart before the horse. All the best mate, JJ

I didn't expect that. From your previous posts, it sounds like you are.

To make positive affirmations work, you have to say the affirmation: "Positive affirmations work."

@shantaram Hi shantaram, I have an analogy about the actualized self that I used before, but I'll use it here again. As you've been told, the self is an illusion, but it's a totally different thing when you see it for yourself. Imagine sailing a boat, believing you have control as to where you go because your hand is on the tiller. Then, something causes you to turn around and look down at the tiller. You see for yourself that this whole time, there was no rudder! You were never steering the boat even when you believed you were! It may take some time, but eventually, you release your hand off the tiller; you release your illusion of control. And instead of the boat crashing, it sails even better now that your hand is off that dang tiller. The wind gently guides the boat, and the boat goes wherever it feels like going. That is actualized sailing. The boat is your body and mind. Your hand on the tiller is ego. Release the tiller, and your body and mind do whatever they feel moved to do. That may sound disastrous, but without the ego's demands, life just flows naturally. You do whatever you feel like doing, and you finish whatever you need to get done. Anything that doesn't get done was probably not worth getting done in the first place. You "work" (it's play) more efficiently without the ego making judgments about choices, because there are no choices; there is only flow. That is the self-actualized life. And yes, it's a contradiction because there is no self to actualize. But this is what Leo is likely referring to. I hope that clears things up for you!

I agree...for the most part. On the way to Truth-realization is discovering the "I Am" (also known as the "witness"), which is the first step to realizing you're not the ego. Jed McKenna aptly calls this stage "Human Adulthood." My guess is that Teal Swan and Alan Watts are here. This is not enlightenment, i.e. truth-realization. Truth-realization happens in a flash, and that is the thing that could be considered black-and-white. Truth can't be divided into shades of gray; it just is. However, having an awakening to the "I Am" or seeing Truth does not magically fix all your ego problems. The ego is seen through, but its conditioning is still there. I would consider this stage post-realization or the deprogramming stage. There was some deprogramming in the previous stages, but this is where the brunt of it takes place. After deprogramming, the body and mind will be aligned with Truth. What it feels moved to do after that is up in the air. Some continue to be a Human Adult and play the human game. Some become hermits. Others have their egos so destroyed to a point where they're unable to function in normal society. UG Krishnamurti was an example of this. You have to keep in mind that after aligning with Truth, the illusion of control is completely destroyed, so it's not like there's any choice as to what the body and mind feel moved to do. So here's my rough map of the stages: Asleep - > Seeker - > Dark Night of Soul - > Human Adulthood -> Deprogramming - > Truth Realization -> Deprogramming -> Truth alignment HOWEVER...On a more fundamental level, this map is bogus. It only helps give you an idea of where you may be headed. This map is a timeline when there is no time; there is only Now. And in the Now, you're either aligned with Truth, or you're not. So on a practical level, you can say there are these stages of delusion, but on a fundamental level, it's binary.

There are no rules as to how you should meditate. Do whatever feels best to you!