Joseph Maynor

I would wager that all of the moderators are more enlightened than me.

There's the egoic self; there's the external world; there's the egoic self in the external world. All illusions. All thought-stories in the mind rather than actual traits of reality. We actively generate the world through our expectations/ cravings of what we seek. This is why being mindful of seeking is probably very important to be mindful of. Let go of knowing and get into a true state of not knowing. This is the only true knowledge, counter-intuitively. Should we expect any other result? Us upright primates?

Or is awareness a passive quality that is actual awareness in the moment, the awareness of the Self rather than the ego Any sense of controlling awareness would be an egoic illusion. Sure, the Self is watching awareness change, and maybe the ego's illusion of changing or increasing awareness, but those changes are merely passively sensed by the higher-order awareness of the Self, which is just passively observing what is, what is actually experienced. The Self takes no action, including managing mindfulness or awareness. Nature causes all that. Am I right? The Self is just noticing what is experienced.

@Anna1 Then how can Atman = Brahman. If I am a perspective, how can I also be the anti-perspective? Does that make sense? Can you see what I am pointing to? I realize we are like deaf people trying to hunt and point around with language with a greater or lesser effectiveness -- which often has more to do with boldness than anything. The audacity to discourse. How can my limited perspective equal the total perspective? I realize Leo answers this in the below video. But humor me with your take! Let's see.

I'm talking about the true Self, not the egoic self. The egoic self is an illusion. The True self . . . . (what?) See? Please explain your insights. Now, if you say something, give your reason for your conclusion. Your reason for your conclusion is 99.9% more insightful than the conclusion you reach. Then we have something to look into. Some new fodder to root around in and look for something good. Like a new pan-full of dirt for the crazed, hopeful gold-miner. Paraphrases from Leo's first video on Absolute Infinity: Reality is just a collection of distinctions. A perspective is only made out of distinctions. All contrasts between things are distinctions. Existence versus non-existence is a distinction. We think of ourselves as existing and are opposed to non-existence. But this is our Human perspective, and this is a relative perspective. From God’s perspective, the most objective perspective possible, there is no distinction in reality between existence and non-existence. Boundaries and distinctions are not objective things. All of these boundaries, distinctions are relative.

Does the possibility-space of perspectives limit the upper and lower bounds of absolute infinity? If not, give a few sentences to correct me. Doesn't the concept of possibility-space reek of Human perspective? How can we conceive of a possibility-space that is objective, stripped of monkey-mind. Possibility-space? Is this an objective concept? A concept stripped of Ape speak. What does a dog think about possibility-space? What does a bat think about possibility-space? What does a jellyfish think about possibility-space? Yet, reality, as objectively contrued using our model of possibility-space, would have to consist of both the existence and non-existence of all of the perspectives of those organisms too, as well as every other possible perspective. Reality has to contain everything and nothing. I realize all this is scaffolding to point to something, but I want to make sure I grok the theory right or else I'm gonna be looking the wrong way. Don't want to do that. I'm jealous of my time. Watch this video on point:

@Dodo You can't do anything except increase awareness. And even this is happening by accident, you are not increasing awareness -- awareness is being increased. Higher awareness is caused by Nature. Sounds like you need to let go more. You don't have any control. Trying to control or taking thoughts too seriously just causes emotional pain which screws up the systems of your body-mind complex, which is what is causing your suffering and stunting your "progress". You just need to increase awareness and let go. Watch yourself solve your true problems. Maybe you need to change. Let yourself change. Stop trying to interfere. You aren't helping. "Progress" means what your body-mind complex would do without all the added neurosis your ego is creating. That added neurosis is what wrenches the system, paradoxically. And you think you are helping yourself. This is egoic. There is no you to help yourself. The best thing you can do is live this Truth. Completely let go of Dodo and just enjoy the ride. Stop trying to do. There is no egoic you that can act or control reality. There is no action or control. You are watching Nature do what Nature does. You are part of Nature. The Self is a constant, omnipresent, field of awareness that is noticing fleeting experiences flow in one giant, monistic, blob. The Self doesn't do anything but sense experience (thoughts are sensed too and part of experience). Awareness is egoic in the sense that the ego needs to have its awareness raised. In contrast, the Self needs no raising of awareness. That would be absurd. The Self would be laughing at us and observing us trying to define it. See the problem? All the Self does is sense what is real, what is True. The Self is no thing, it is the sensor of things, and the field of perception for all reality, experience, concepts, thoughts, including space and time. The Self laughs at the audacity of space and time to define reality. What space and time are are thoughts that are perceived by the Self, not traits of reality. It would be like you trying to create a realistic cyborg of a human being containing a Self. Not possible. You might infinitely approximate this, but you would always lack the magical missing piece to make it a reality, to make it the Truth. Watch this video on point:

@Juan Cruz Giusto This video from Leo is also on point. I just watched it again. This is a great sequel to his Karma video. This video really explains where the rubber meets the road with higher consciousness living.

Elaborate further. Give us a couple of sentences. Idealism and bicentrism mean everything and nothing without some kind of contextual stipulation, definition, or clarification.

@Edvard Awareness is increasing, but you gotta get to the point where you completely release because there is no free will. That's the final counter-intuitive move. You have no control, that's an illusion. Remember this: Enlightenment is not attaining anything. You just realize what is already True. You are already enlightened, except the ego keeps throwing monkey wrenches in the gears to hide this Truth from you. The ego tortures you with neuroses, addictions, and distractions to keep you from noticing this reality. So, awareness is the only thing that can fix this. There is no you to act. That is an illusion. Action is taking place, and you are aware of it, but you're also half-down the rabbit hole of illusion too. The mind is in cahoots with the ego. So, you gotta put the breaks on your mind. That's the process, initially. That's about where I am now with enlightenment. The mind is the enemy. Thought-story is evil existentially speaking. Practically speaking, do whatever you want with thought-story. But existentially, thought is a no-go. The best you can get is a good scaffolding theory that sets your awareness up in the right way. Increased awareness needs to be caused in you. That's what all this monkey-chatter and self-inquiry does. And you are not even in control over whether you become enlightened or not. It's a luck of the draw. A random variant of Nature. But don't try to control the mind. Paradoxically, only increased awareness dissolves the ego. Accept all thoughts, and gently try to release the negative ones. Disown all thoughts -- they are not your thoughts. There is no you at the center of experiences, including sensations and thoughts. All there is is a self-aware sensations, feelings, or thoughts, with no egoic center. The egoic center causes a lot of the problems as well as the belief in an external world. Those two paradigms are deadly -- the egoic paradigm (belief in an egoic self) and the external world paradigm (belief in an external world). Watch: And watch this one: And this awesome one by Emerald:

Meditating by stilling the mind. I did this for like a year and is bad because it is a kind of self-interference.

There is no me that is at the center of the self-aware phenomenal field. Sensations in the phenomenal field do not connect to a me. That is a false egoic belief. This is tricky.

I'm starting to flatten the illusion out of the Naive Reality paradigm. Do they occur at any time? This is getting very counter-intuitive. You can kinda appreciate this if you set a radio next to your bed. Then ask yourself -- is the sound I hear in space or time? Sound is the sensation of sound that you experience. You may sense a directionality to the sound, like it is a vector. Does this mean that sound is directional? Or is this a belief laid on top of the raw sensation of the sound itself? Have you tried to unpack this? The Self can't really be thought of as being distributed across any 3 dimensional space. I know we often use this model to explain the Self, but it is false. The camera can't go from a cone shape to a sphere. That's just going from one finite model to another finite model. How can we be a self-aware field of sensations outside of space and time? It seems that this cannot even be conceived of. This is where theory has to melt into practice right here; where theory ran out of gas. "The Absolute Now, feeling like God looking in on Himself." Watch this video.

@JustinS No.

@Danielle This is the hardest and most counter-intuitive of things to do. The final surrender. The ego uses need to know, need to have right answer, need to understand, need to judge, need for clarification, to fight for its very life. It's on the ropes but it's still hanging in there. You gotta give the ego that one final knockout punch. Let go of knowing and get into a true state of not knowing. This is what I am struggling to do with my enlightenment right now. There's actually no struggling because there is no free will. But it is taking the time it is taking for my awareness to get keen enough to cure this issue. I assume it will take the rest of my life to clean out some of these beliefs from the subconscious mind. Enlightenment is a life-long process, a cleansing away of illusions. Great video if you haven't seen this one.

Watch this video too:

@momo You might want to elaborate more. Idealism alone is a very broad concept.

The Truth is the Self, so this is outside of space and time, right? So, with that said, is the Truth only what is happening in the present moment? Is this belief True? See the problem? // Food for thought: You can only experience reality in the present moment in what you’re sensing. So, the Truth must be tied to the present moment, no? How can Truth be limited this way?

Not fully enlightened yet. But I watched all of Leo's videos 3 times in a row. Oldest to newest, oldest to newest, oldest to newest. Like that. I also watched all of Emerald's (the "Diamond Net" on Youtube) videos 2 times in a row (link below). You need to know some theory to work on your enlightenment. You are fighting illusion with illusion. You gotta dig in there with good theory, self inquiry, and learn from a Guru how to avoid many traps. This forum is great for doing just that and we all aid each other here ultimately. We are all sages in training here. If you want to become enlightened, you can definitely do it here. But you gotta do the hard work. The intellectual work. And the self-correcting work. Basically you have to convince the ego that it, itself, is a phony. That's what enlightenment is. It basically works like this for the ego -- should I believe me or my lying eyes! And that's the beginning of the end for the ego once awareness raises to that point. Once the ego starts to give up the ghost and dissolve, then all your problems do too. Kinda sweet. Emerald's channel. The Diamond Net. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvW2U2-szAK2lBzUYOw0DwA This is a very good video from Leo that everybody should watch now. Even if you are advanced. It is worth it. And one from Emerald

@Leo Gura If you take our human reality to be Maya, then why take a sober, scientific view of life? Maybe that clings too much to a paradigm. Maybe Bhakti Yoga is a way of liberation from that sterile kind of intellectual life. Just a thought. A liberation from taking life too seriously, too literally. The scientist awakens to the realization that religion is a nice myth among his other myths of reality. There is no right myth, no True paradigm. So why not expand into myth a little bit, maybe progressively over time. This has parallels to psychedelics, but on a theoretical rather than a perceptual level. You lose the science perspective, the perspective of the careful knower, the straight, hard-nosed thinker. You discover that that is a limited paradigm, finite perspective, role, among an infinite number of equally valid and equally ridiculous possibilities. It's a way to dissolve need to have right answer. This might work to dissolve your web of beliefs more. This is tough for me too, because like you I have a very conceptual, intellectual, tough-minded "view" of our Maya. Practicing Bhakti Yoga non-dogmatically would be key. Kind of like experiencing spirituality through poetry rather than prose. Through myth rather than through science. My guess is the ideal would be analogous to a kind of poetic-prose like Emerson or Santayana's writing style, a middle-way. After all, none of this stuff is pointing directly at the Truth anyway. It just hints around it. Why not fold Maya in on itself, make a tasty sandwich out of it, and then eat it for lunch? Then laugh, meditate a little bit and actually be the Truth for a while. "Being is magic" "Reality is mystical" -- Leo Gura Watch this video on point:

Just curious. Is this the Absolute or is it a perspective?

Watch this video. I think you will find your answer. Actual reality only comes to you through direct experience. An image is real but it is not the thing that it represents. Looking at your hand and thinking about your hand are two different things. One is sense one is image. What we gotta get clear about is what is real and what is belief. If you close your eyelids, your house disappears from your senses right? But you still believe the house exists. But see, your belief at that point is a concept, not sensed. That's what it means that your house disappeared. Technically what disappeared is your visuals of the house. Your belief that the house is more than that is not in the house but in your head. And those beliefs may persist when you close your eyes, but your reality of the house, the visuals have vanished. See the difference here? What is trying to be shown to you is how much of your reality is actually conceptual instead of literal. When you become more mindful of this, you can start to see that many beliefs you have about what is real and true are in fact false beliefs. Your visual of your house is not your concept of your house. Often times we take the conceptual house and think that that is what is real. No, technically what is real is your thought as something sensed and the visuals of the house. The thought-story (the meaning of the thought sensed) is not real, yet that is what unenlightened people take to be most real.

@Dan Arnautu Sounds like something set him off possibly. If it's a discrete thing, try to get him to tell you about it. Insist that he tell you. That's the least he can do for scaring the crap out of you like that. That would be the initial strategy in my book. Find out if it is an isolated trigger or a more systematic problem. After you find that out, then plan how to take the next step accordingly. But it sounds like you need more information at this point.

Do nothing is where you totally release. But if you haven't worked on your awareness and mindfulness, you will just zone-out and the meditation will be pointless. So what you want to do is awareness-focus meditation -- which is basically do-nothing meditation but you are being mindful of your awareness. That's a good one to train you to know what awareness is. Active-release meditation teaches you how to release thoughts. Mindfulness meditation teaches you how to identify each piece of experience as it comes though the door, so you can see how reality is woven together with these threads. Once you practice these 3 kinds of meditation for a while, you will develop the tools to be able to do no-manipulation meditation, which is where you just let go and are aware of everything that is happening. You are releasing into the Self, into Brahman when you do this right. So, when you do do nothing meditation right you are turning off the mind, the ego, and are being nothing other than the Self. Control is ultimately illusory. This is when you realize no-manipulation meditation is the best and most advanced kind of meditation. I'm speaking only from my own experience here.

Do nothing is the most advanced form of meditation. I would practice 3 other forms of meditation too: Awareness-focus, active-release, and mindfulness meditation. You need to really become aware of awareness to do do nothing meditation properly. So aware that you don't need to manipulate anything anymore -- even trying to be aware is released. I make this recommendation based on looking at how my path has worked out. 1 hour of do-nothing meditation is the only meditation I do in the morning every day. But I spent a couple of months doing 4 types for 15 minutes each: Do-nothing, Awareness-focus, Active-release, and Mindfulness Meditation. In that order. What happened is that I got to the point where the only kind of meditation I wanted to do was do-nothing. So, it chose me. But I had to go through the process to get to that point. The other forms of meditation help you increase your awareness. Watch this video to see the practices I suggest: Make sure you are doing do-nothing meditation correctly. Watch this video.