Emerald

I read the comments from before, but I still didn't understand your reasoning. I have no dog in the race, one way or the other. I still think Shinzen is a great teacher. But I don't even know how somebody could determine someone else's enlightenment status. I'm just curious as to what you base that interpretation on.

Attachment and love are two totally different things. What you would have, if you transcended your ego, is unconditional love without attachment to all of existence. This means that you would love you parents far more than you were ever capable of loving them before. You also would have no fear of losing them, because you would realize that nothing truly dies and that everything is eternally connected. Also, any other fears you have would melt away. Don't let the abstract idea of enlightenment scare you away from the real deal. The real deal is truly amazing.

@jip Certainly, trying to become enlightened could cause suffering. But so could trying to become wealthy, attractive, worldly, a veterinarian, etc. The primary difference is that reaching enlightenment is alleviation from suffering while all other pursuits are just dressing up suffering. But the attempt at reaching enlightenment usually requires discipline, time investment, and sacrifice of all illusions. All other pursuits will require at least two of these anyway. So, why not invest the time and effort? All you really have to lose are concepts and illusions.

There is no clear way to tell. But it is important to ask yourself why you'd want to know in the first place. It can illuminate to you your beliefs and assumptions about enlightenment and value, which will better enable you to remove these barriers.

It depends on the person but probably more often self-acceptance. Levels of masculinity and femininity are mostly pre-conditioned, so they are real forces of nature within people. Everyone has a unique signature of these energies. So, if a person identifies at transgendered, they likely have an inverse ratio of these energies compared to the average person of their sex.

This is a difficult thing to understand. So, to understand you have to first understand the idea of paradox, where two contradictory things are true at the same time. That is because there are higher truths based more in the ultimate truth of non-duality; and there are lower truths based in the illusion of duality. At the highest level of truth (non-duality) everything is one, everything is infinite, everything is empty of meaning, suffering is illusory, life/death are illusory, beginning/end are illusory, creation/destruction are illusory. From this level of truth, everything is beautiful including tragedy, death, and destruction because they all are part of divine order. Only the enlightened live in tune with this truth, and it is the most peaceful mindset to live because there is no fear of death in this paradigm. It is to truly embrace the temporal nature and inherent meaninglessness in all of existence. But the vast majority of people, including myself, live in tune with the illusion. So, lower truths will resonate more with us, because they seem more practical. And in some senses they really are. Enlightened people tend to respect the lower truths too, and go out of their way to practice compassion toward those who are suffering. So, from the illusion, there is suffering, corruption, greed, pain, and many other forms of hell to deal with. These should be addressed systematically. But if we, as a society, can realize the higher truth, then the hells of the lower truth will naturally dissipate. So, the higher truth is incredibly practical in this way, because it is the only truth that yields unconditional love and compassion.

Purpose, meaning, and reason are simply mechanisms of the human mind. They don't exist separate from human consciousness.

@jordanhandrew @Emily The problem with spiritual drug use is that it is a temporary expansion of consciousness at best. The results aren't permanent. Six years ago, when I was in college, I tried Ayahuasca twice. Both times, I completely transcended my ego, and it was the most beautiful feeling I've ever had. I was whole again. So, I've had a taste of enlightenment. But the only value it now conveys to me is that it enables me to pursue enlightenment work without needing that much faith. I know there is a destination to the long journey, so I'm more likely to take it. That said, I made many unwise decisions after the experience ended because I tried to abstractly apply the insights I received from the higher state of consciousness from a low-consciousness frame of mind, thinking that it would yield good results. For the most part, it did the opposite. Paradoxes will get you every time. My recommendation is to avoid spiritual drug use, because I don't want people making the same mistakes as I did. That said, if it's important to you, be sure to do tons of research and preparation; and remind yourself that an insight just becomes more knowledge, if it isn't directly connected to higher consciousness. Wisdom is like a river; it's alive and ever-changing. So, a wise decision now, is a foolish decision tomorrow.

Thank you.

I'm hoping this will happen sooner than later. I'm a very tenacious person, for better and worse. So, I tend to stress myself out needlessly or get involved in fantasy land to escape from the needlessly created stress. Just a few days ago, I started to suspect that it is my ego's way of generating distracting thoughts to keep me from seeing through the illusions that it spins. Surrender as a concept, has been popping up very synchronistically in different facets of my life recently.

Thank you.

Good advice.

This makes perfect sense.

Maybe a deeper exploration of the visual sense itself could help. The only thing we ever see are shapes, imbued with colors on a flat plane. So, the visual sense has only two dimensions, instead of three as we're accustomed to thinking. I'm a painter, and this has to be learned if someone wants to learn to depict something accurately. Maybe if you're able to see the image of yourself as being only shapes imbued with colors it would help.

What are emotions? How do I experience emotions? Where do emotions originate from? What is the relationship between thoughts and emotions? What senses do I experience (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, thought, anything else)? Are my senses connected or separate from one another? Do I arbitrarily link certain senses together? (example: arbitrarily linking sight with touch)

I think the greed aspect came about way before capitalism. Capitalism is just the form that it takes in modern society. I think it is part of people's lower nature. But on a brighter note, I actually think that we've become more humane as human society evolves. I actually would go as far as to say that we're a lot more compassionate in the modern era, than in times passed. I'm generally optimistic about the future.

It must take up a lot of your time. My time is monopolized by having children, so I guess this is my biggest barrier in that sense. At this point, I wouldn't be able to do a retreat because they are so little. Even carving out an hour a day for meditation is a bit of an ordeal. But fear of letting go of control is my biggest psychological barrier.

How could you tell if Shinzen Young is enlightened or not? If he claims to be enlightened, I certainly believe him as he seems to have firsthand experience. But ultimately, no one knows except for him. But what is it that makes you sure that he isn't?

Sort of reminds me of the biggest problem of capitalism - always trying to sell you the future version of yourself. You can never be fine as you are, because it isn't as profitable.

Build a strong ego through personal development and becoming as successful as you want to be. Don't feel guilty about it or feel as though you shouldn't be. But be mindful of the ego's illusions, self-congratulatory talk, and self-deprecating talk. Make systematic efforts to unravel the ego's illusions, as you develop it. Repressing the ego will never help you transcend it. If the ego has needs, meet them but do so mindfully.

This is the one that I was talking about. I think it could apply similarly.

The Sufi poem?

Waking up and not waking up are equally valuable endeavors. So, choosing to "stay in the park" may be appropriate for most people. That said, one thing I realized during my experience is how much struggling/suffering I endure as a constant backdrop during life to the point where I don't realize it... like a fish unaware that it is in water. Any happy moment is always spiked with this background sense of unease. I only realize it now through contrast with my experiences. So, there is no true peace of mind when immersed in the average perspective. Of course, there are degrees and levels of consciousness within the average perspective, so freeing yourself from some illusions will make life more livable even if you don't reach full-blown enlightenment. So, doing consciousness work is worth pursuing, even if you're uneasy about the idea of full-blown enlightenment.

That makes a lot of sense. I know that my emotions didn't go away during my experiences, so I would have likely still felt negative emotion had I sacrificed family and friends to become enlightened. It's just that I would likely have sensed that negative emotion as an inextricable part of the divinity inherent in all of nature and recognized it as empty of negative meaning in the grand scheme of things. Currently, I am unconscious of this phenomena, but have only a memory of experiencing that. So, perhaps one in that state of mind could interpret the experience in the way that McKenna does. To experience the I AM, do you have any recommendations for processes that you used to become more aware of it?

Well, you could try to highlight, improve, and frame whatever masculine traits are already there. Sort of like a reframing of your normal persona. In this way, the human personality is malleable. But masculinity and femininity are mostly pre-conditioned states of being. Inventing masculinity in your personality where there is none, is going to be crazy-making. If you want people to respect you, I recommend accepting your traits: both masculine and feminine. Human beings are naturally androgynous and have a mix of both masculine and feminine traits in varying degrees; so to attempt to get rid of your feminine traits would be repression. The main problem is that you equate femininity in a man as a weakness. It is not. Femininity is just an energy that someone has about them. For example, who would deny that David Bowie was a feminine man, yet he was unapologetically himself and had a very strong personality. So, my advice is to exalt the traits that you have... positive and negative. Max out each trait you have in the most beneficial way that you can. As Shakespeare said, "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." So, don't look at you traits as "negative" or "positive." You just have neutral traits that can be applied in beneficial and non-beneficial ways. Do this, and you'll be so above what those other guys think of you, that you won't even care what they think.