Emerald

I've experienced the emptiness too... after I experience ego death. And there there is nothing and no desire. And there is no self to take anything in. But most of my experiences of God have been a more subtle decentering of the ego to reveal God's consciousness underneath... and showed me the everything-ness element of the infinite. It's like a drop that realizes that it's the ocean... or a twig that realizes that it's the tree. But I don't claim to know anything about infinity, as I do not know its true nature. And my suspicion is that no human being can know the true nature of infinity. I only 'know' that I've had certain subjective experiences of different facets of God, and that the understanding I've taken from my memories of these experiences has led me to certain conclusions that I now use to help me navigate through life. I take my experiences a bit like the blind men and the elephant. In my experiences, it has been like feeling the tusks of the elephant. Perhaps in others' experiences, they have felt the tail of the elephant. So, my perception is that we are both blind men... and you are just describing one part of the elephant. And I have felt this part of the elephant too. I also like to think of it through this analogy. Let's say that God is an infinite pie. And I have experienced God in my medicine journeys 8 times. So, I've eaten 8 slices of infinite pie. And 7 out of those 8 times, God was a cherry pie with the experiences of oneness and everythingness. But one out of those 8 times, God was a meat pie... this is when I experienced ego dissolution. But with an infinite pie, you cannot know the true nature of its filling. Even if you were eating pie nonstop for your whole life and you only ever ate cherry pie from the infinite pie... you could not know that cherry was the true nature of the filling of the infinite pie. And that is because, you could have all sorts of unknown fillings in the pie that are outside of the realm of your experience. Who knows, maybe most of the infinite pie has a filling of motor oil. And that is where the surrender of the illusion of knowing the ineffable comes into play for those who have had awakenings.

It's definitely a bit like that. This was that feeling too. But there was also this sense that, when my daughter was speaking I could feel that sense of namaste... which means the God in me sees the God in you. And even though she was just talking about a show she was watching, it was this quick awareness that I was looking directly at God and I could "see" it shine through her face. And for a split second, it was like I was God talking to God in a bubble of experience made of God... and that that was all there was. And it was this quick flash of a feeling. But I took it as a nudge for me to recognize how significant small moments of connection like that are... and how that moment was really everything. And it felt this struck me like it did in this mundane moment to emphasize the importance of being present in moments like that with my kids.

The reason why is very straightforward. I genuinely don't prefer to transcend because I don't prefer how it is. And in my heart of hearts, I prefer to be embodied as this human and to forget the infinite to embrace innocence and unburden myself. Also, it's a little like the difference between a person who enjoys playing video games versus a person who likes to deconstruct the console. Certainly, you could do both. But I'm not as interested in deconstructing the console as I am actually playing the game... though deconstructing the console here and there for the purpose of enriching the gameplay is definitely interesting to me. So, it's just a preference. And you could have a preference for one, the other, or both... depending on what your life path is. And what my Ayahuasca experiences have shown me is that I was created specifically as God's vacation from God to make the infinite existence manageable for that part of its consciousness... among tons of other things it does to be effortlessly present with and to feel the totality of the infinite suffering it must always be knowing, creating, loving, and experiencing forever and ever and at infinitely deep levels. And it is always encouraging me to be like a hobbit and to have fun and enjoy like I did when I was a child, as it created this life to give this point of its consciousness mercy from the infinite suffering. It even once brought me back into memories of when I was obsessed with Scooby Doo as a young child, and it wanted me to embrace that childlike spirit again. It's like in the movie Citizen Kane where his last word was "Rosebud". (I won't spoil the ending the movie here, but it definitely relates to the theme of relinquishing power and embracing joy and simplicity) Now, my supposition is that God splits off the parts of itself that are more Yin as these parts feel the pain and burdens of the everything-ness aspect of the infinite and then incarnates them into limited forms so that they can find mercy from the too-much-ness... but of course I'm not sure of this. It's just me putting 2 and 2 together to make sense of what I experienced. So, the spiritual is really one and the same with the material. They're not separate. And it is the same as any other human being's experience, only with the contrast of the infinite... which enriches the lived experience.

Yes I have a partner, and 2 kids... a 13 yo and a 9 yo.

I'm just sharing my subjective experiences and what I have come to believe and have chosen to exercise faith in based off of those experiences. It is all that any human could ever hope to do, which can be a hard pill to swallow. I must surrender to the fact that everything I've ever experienced could be totally illusory (including my awakenings)... but also to recognize that my subjective perspective is the only vector of reality that I have access to... and that it is the only compass that I can operate off of and exercise faith in that enables me to preserve my own sovereignty. And I am choosing to exercise faith in my imperfect subjective perspective as a valid wisdom compass for navigation. It is only then, that I can truly be a sovereign being standing in my own power. Though of course, I could alway be wrong. And that is okay too.

Very well said!

Thank you! The way that I would say it is that it's a little bit like the parable of The Diamond Net of Indra. In the parable, the God Indra hangs an infinite net in the sky that stretches in infinite directions. And at each of the vortices of the net, there is a jewel. And there are infinite jewels in the net. But each jewel reflects all the other jewels in the net. And from a certain perspective, there is just one jewel that contains and reflects all the other jewels in the net. So, the expansion path is one where you recognize yourself as the one jewel that contains and reflects all other jewels. These are experiences that I've had of God realization in my medicine journeys... and I can also operate through this assumption in my contemplations as well. But the contraction path is one where you forget that you are the one jewel and you become one jewel out of many in the net. This is also the consensus perspective. And in surrendering totally to being one jewel out of many, it removes the existential pressure of the expectation of perfection and you can embrace the beauty of the imperfections. And you get to live the story and really immerse yourself in it and forget that you're in a story. And this makes the story more meaningful. But having had the contrasting experiences of the Truth, the illusion becomes much sweeter and more profound. And there is an expansion in enrichment and joy. It's a little bit like the saying that goes something like, "First there are mountains and rivers and trees. Then, there are no mountains and rivers and trees. The, there are mountains and rivers and trees again." It is the contrast of the emptiness of meaning that enables you to find what's meaning to you. And you can also find the infinite couched within the finite. For example, a couple months ago, my family and I went into a cafe. And my daughter was talking to me about something, and in that moment, there was this palpable feeling that that moment was everything happening in the universe. It's hard to explain. But it's like the infinite shines through in finite forms and you can feel how much everything matters.

Thank you!

From the perspective of those on this forum or people who see seeking enlightenment as the one true path, I'm sure that my decision to surrender to and embrace my human limitations and to live the story will seem resistant and deluded. But J have been shown that enlightenment isn't the only game that God plays with itself. And I choose to exercise faith in these experiences and their feeling of rightness over what some people in the world of Maya believe about enlightenment and truth. What it showed me is that it is just as happy to be a Buddha as it is happy to be a sea urchin. And any incarnation comes with limits and handicaps. And it is through these limits and handicaps that meaning and beauty are possible. It is only because a story has a beginning and an end that you can have happiness and joy. And it is only in separation that relationship is possible. And my path is a feminine path of embracing limitation and contraction rather than the masculine path of expansion. Though my experiences of expansion and awakening have served to enrich my Earthly experience, transcendence is not actually what I want. I came here to play the game and live the story. So, if you lay out the option to be Emerald or to be God, I'm definitely going to pick Emerald every time as it is as clear to me as it is possible for a human to have clarity that this is the function of this lifetime. To give some context as to why this is integral to my path, I have dealt since I was very small with a God complex that originally stemmed from a lack of trust and feelings of unsafety. And it's come from a traumatized 3 year old aspect of myself. And at that age, it isn't so clear that you aren't the center of the universe. So, I have this part of my that feels it must be perfect and do all the scary things alone. And it has created this lonely anxious God dynamic that hums underneath all of my experiences. And it has given me this life-long burden of feeling like I have to know perfectly but also paired with a genuine curiosity that's pretty insatiable. And it has led me to constant expansion into more and more insights. But because I cannot know Truth in the absolute, it has left me ever expanding and expanding and expanding and spreading myself thin trying to know. This is even true, having gone through ego dissolution and many awakenings. You can be it, but you cannot know it. And in my journeys, I have experienced infinite knowledge twice... and it is completely overwhelming. It showed this to me to help me remember that my path doesn't have to do with expansion of knowledge but rather to do with contraction of knowledge. And I can tell you, infinite knowing is a real crown of thorns. And I'm not Christian, but God had shared with me that it is only the Christ that had to bear the burdens of the infinite as a finite being and that I don't have to do it because no one has to do that anymore. And that's a good thing too, because it is like hell in ways that I struggle to communicate and understand. And it has even taught me how to wear the crown and then pass the crown and appreciate other people more, and to disappear into being a side character in the story to diffuse the weight of the crown. And it was such a joy to conceptualize of myself as a background extra in the story of someone else's life. So, as God it has picked Emerald to incarnate this overwhelmed part of itself into to relieve that part from the burdens of the infinite. But Emerald can't help herself and keeps going back into knowledge expansion mode and sneaking back into the cookie jar of knowledge. So, there is a learning curve to contraction and the letting go of the need to know. But in my Ayahuasca experiences, God has worked with me to heal my knowledge-seeking obsession and show me the value of embracing ordinariness, limitations, and contraction and to be able to surrender and to exercise faith in lieu of knowledge... which is what my neuroses have disallowed me from. And this constant truth-seeking has put a cap on my ability to show up in life fully as myself as it is like I am always in protection mode. So, over the past couple of years my path has been about embracing the path of contraction and limitation... and grounding deeply into the human experience and allowing myself to be ordinary and imperfect. And a huge part of that has been about recognizing and accepting the limits to my ability to know... whilst also exercising faith in my own experiences of God consciousness and exercising faith in my own inner compass of my intuitions and insights. And a big learning curve is in being able to put trust and faith in my own subjective experiences and perspectives, despite recognizing that they are limited and that I cannot know and do not know the absolute objective truth and never will. I know that my path doesn't fit your idea of a spiritual path, and you may see it as deluded. But keep in mind that both truth and illusion are part of the Truth. And both expansion and contraction are part of Expansion. And both the finite and the infinite are part of the Infinite. There is not two... but one. And the contraction path is just the other side of the coin to the expansion path. And it is clear to me that I open up and expand when I allow myself contract... and contract when I try to expand.

@Leo Gura I was just watching the video you made on Post-Modernism, and I came across the part where you were saying the Post-Modernist would say, "The whole bible is a joke" and that only those who get it would know. And it reminded me of an irony that occurred to me regarding the Bible. Like the whole first book of the Bible states that 'eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil' and gaining knowledge of good and evil is the original sin... and that seeing the world through the lens of good and evil is what produces shame and casts us out of paradise. And then ironically, the Bible proceeds to be regarded as a book about the knowledge of good and evil... and people still see the Bible that way. So, the first book of the Bible is basically like "It's the biggest sin you could possibly commit to read this book and take it as a moral compass."

In this regard, it's just the same way that men operate when they pursue a woman they're attracted to. Likely when you're attracted to a woman, it's not a sense of rewarding the woman with affection because she earned it by doing x, y, or z. There is likely no sense that you are rewarding women by being attracted to them or sexually involved with them. It's just a desire to move towards them because it feels good to you. The same thing is true when a woman is attracted to a man. It's just a feeling of desire that arises for her subjectively. There is no sense of rewarding the man with affection as a woman doesn't look at herself as a scorekeeper who rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. Punishment and rewards don't even enter her mind... nor is she even thinking logically about which qualities the man possesses that are more or less "deserving" of her affection. If she really likes the guy, she is mostly worries if he likes her in return. There is just a tendency in books and movies and things for women to serve as the prize or the validator of the male main character. But that's not how it is in reality. From the woman's perspective, it's just doing what feels good subjectively and pursuing what produces amorous feelings. And it's mostly about seeking intimacy and sometimes other feelings.

I've had one journey per year since 2020. So, 5 journeys in the past few years... and 2 journeys at age 20.

I'm suspicious of this answer.

Thank you. I think it's just that the OP's pain is associated with concerns that women may enjoy dominating men and embarrassing them, as he has written about it on other posts. And because I am speaking over the internet, this doesn't give him a chance to read my actual facial expressions. And he might imagine me as a wicked witch trying to antagonize him for my own sadistic pleasure, when in reality, this is just how I show up in this context. I come here to share my perspective with others who value these types of perspectives, and I do like to challenge others a bit as well because the environment is very conducive to intellectual sparring. I think I just accidentally pushed a trigger button with my directness.

As are all those savages you mentioned before, that don't want Truth. What makes you different?

I'm not picking on you. I'm just telling you something that might help you as it is something I've seen before. Perhaps my tone doesn't carry well over the internet. But if you don't want me to reply anymore, that is okay.

There is no guarantee that my mind isn't lying to me. In fact, everything that I've every assumed about reality could be totally untrue. Such is the nature of a human being's epistemological blindspot. We cannot know the objective truth. No matter how many times I've woken up to my nature as God, I will always be limited and unaware of what I'm unaware of as long as I am Emerald. In fact, in my last Ayahuasca experience, I kept affirming "I am choosing to be limited" as I was cutting myself off from the infinite knowledge as God was showing me the burdens of the infinite on the shoulders of the finite. That is what it means to embrace one's humanity. It means accepting the handicaps and limitations of your ability to know and exercising faith, which has always been difficult for me as my issues have always been about lacking trust in what is outside of myself. As a human being, we can NEVER know anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. And I've tried and tried and spun my wheels in daily constant contemplation since early childhood. And that's I cannot know what's true and what's illusion whether I'm deciding to seek enlightenment or choosing to surrender to my humanity. I could always be dead wrong. And I've gone around and around in this contemplating over the years. But I am choosing to exercise faith in my experiences of God and my experiences in general despite and because of my limitations. And I have decided to trust that my realizations of God are real... and to trust what it has shown me and to use it as a navigational tool. And along with this, I am choosing to surrender to and trust my own internal compass. But of course, everything I've ever experienced and known could be and likely is an illusion. But that is not for me to know.

Do you really want truth?

First off, much of this will sound way out there... because these are what my medicine journeys have shown me. And I have adopted many of these insights into how I approach my life, as they have helped me get on track with what I really want to experience. I just wanted to preface it before I answer. 1. Enlightenment isn't a denial as there is no one there to deny anything. It is simply a total dispossession of the illusion of the story that you are currently living to the point were there is nothing but pure consciousness. It is where reality (including yourself) blows away like dust in the wind and empty consciousness itself remains. But human attachments can be an impediment to a human being relinquishing the illusion of life and reality. This is why it can be more difficult to wake up as a householder because there is more to be attached to. 2. Yes, ego dissolution is death itself, just not death from a bodily perspective. It's a death from the perspective of consciousness. The way I would describe it is that it's like a drop of water getting sublimated into the ocean... only that ocean is pure nothingness and pure consciousness. 3. Yes, that's correct. I was shown in my medicine journey that the reason why God decided to split off an element of its consciousness to incarnate into the illusory finite form Emerald is because this element of its consciousness did not want to be open and accepting of infinite suffering. And to be reintegrated with God, there must be a total willingness to create, know, experience, and love all things in existence... including all suffering. And it was too much for this point of God's consciousness, so out of mercy to itself, God cut away this part of itself and incarnated it into a finite form where there is a finite amount of suffering to experience. And it was through the contraction and limitation that there was mercy. 4. Yes, it showed me that Emerald was the illusion/story that was woven for this purpose. And the preference at this point, seems to be to live infinite lifetimes as this character in order to avoid the awareness of infinite suffering and infinite knowledge. It also in other journeys showed me many permutations of Emerald lives, as this is where God's suffering part goes to get a vacation from the infinite. And it even reassured me in my last journey that I took that I could choose to live as many lives as Emerald as I wanted to. And it has shown me how valuable the function of my life is as it is only in the finite and imperfection that consciousness can experience meaning and beauty. And it showed me that, if I have a choice between being God and being Emerald, that it is wiser for me to handicap myself into smallness and limitation and choose Emerald.

There definitely is such a thing as spiritual bypassing. And I'm 100% sure that Sadhguru would agree with me on this as he has his tales about Shankaran Pilai that he tells which is all about the foolishness of a spiritual bypasser. Just keep in mind that moving towards transcendence is VERY different from a resistance to the Earthly. Remember, that which you resist persists. And you cannot transcend what you have an aversion to.... as you will be like Briar Rabbit fighting with the tar baby.

I'll try to make this clearer... but I am explaining something ineffable, so it's difficult for me to simplify it. In a nutshell, in my Ayahuasca experiences each one has come with a realization that myself as Emerald and God are like two sides of the same coin. In one of them, I experience a total ego dissolution and there was no Emerald and just God. And in the others, Emerald remained intact but my awareness expanded to see the connection to God. Almost like if a twig on a tree expanded its scope of awareness to realize that it is also the tree itself, when before the scope of its consciousness was too narrow to sense that it was part of a bigger tree. That is what happened in these experiences where my human consciousness expanded until I realized the connection with God's consciousness... and that there was no separation between the two. And there have been many conversations in my medicine journeys that I had with God as both the twig and the entire tree including the twig at once. And in these interactions between myself as Emerald and myself as the infinite, it has shown be a lot about the life it/I have chosen and why it/I have chosen to live this particular life... and why enlightenment isn't part of this lifetime. And in my ego dissolution experience, there was no Emerald. Emerald was just a story in a character that was a total illusion and never actually existed. There was just pure consciousness. And this was enlightenment and death, which were one and the same. And I could have chosen that. But I decided that I wanted to live the finite experience. And I have chosen the finite over the infinite by choosing to handicap myself to get away from infinite knowledge and infinite love. And it is in these limitations that meaning and beauty are born. This is the path of contraction, where you fully embrace the Earthly forms and live the finite experience of life. It is the opposite of enlightenment which is the path of expansion, and is about transcendence of the illusion of the Earthly forms and is death itself. And the latter was shown to me to be a very difficult path that is only sought out by a small number of people (like monks) who incarnated here just to go through the difficult "game" of transcending it. God showed me this to create an understanding of the contrast between my life's path and a monk's life path... where mine is more about receiving the gift of the illusion rather than transcending it. It's sort of like playing the video game... instead of deconstructing the console and exploring the code. I hope this is somewhat understandable, but I recognize it may not be because it is describing elements of the ineffable.

I'm not even talking about as an aftermath after a man gets his sexual drives out of his system. I mean in general... regardless of sexual appetites or gender. It's pretty evident to me that most people don't actually want enlightenment... including those who believe they do. My perception from his posts is that the OP doesn't really want enlightenment, but that he's moreso just in resistance to life. And that's a different thing from genuinely being on the expansion path.

Yes, sometimes the way we say things with language can muddy the waters of concepts like self-love. And we come to ask "How can I love myself?" But in actuality the love is just there and can't not be there.

Anything that anchors you to your human life and Earthly form prevents you from enlightenment. These things that anchor you deeper into the story. Attachment to anything of the material realm can hold you here and in resistance to the death. But my question is... does the OP actually want awakening? Is that actually part of his story here that he moves towards from a place of genuinely wanting that? Or is he just in resistance to life... and wants to use seeking enlightenment as an excuse to run away from himself by spiritually bypassing his pain? Likewise, I could ask the same of everyone on this forum who seeks enlightenment. My estimate is that very few who seek it really truly want it. When I was given the option, I realized that I didn't want it as I preferred to maintain the illusions of the finite and the separate for the wealth of human experiences that I can have. One thing that God showed me in one of my medicine journeys is that God likes to play different kinds of games with itself as a means of managing the infinite mercy and suffering it must experience. And it plays mercy and suffering games with itself to maximize its own mercy whilst still holding space for suffering and never negating it. And this enables it to handle its infinite existence because the games it builds in are like levers of release. And one of the games is to spit the parts of itself that are overwhelmed by the infinite into finite contracted forms. And those finite contracted parts experience a limited amount of suffering and mercy. And it is within these limitations of the finite story where meaning and beauty are born. And it showed me that monks play this really difficult game of dispossessing themselves of their human forms and transcending life to experience the mercy from contraction and illusion, but that this is an uncommon game to play that is pretty much reserved for monk-types because most that are incarnated here don't prefer this path... even if they believe they do. And that makes sense... in the majority of cases, why would God choose to incarnate here in the first place just to have its avatar wake up to the illusion it has spun? But it showed me that he and I are playing a different kind of game than the monks that's, where it creates a reality for me and I receive all the positives and negatives of that reality as a gift. It's encouraged me to think of myself like a Paris Hilton type getting spoiled by her rich daddy. In Tantra (which means expansion/contraction), it has shown me that my path is one of contraction. And I just don't get the sense that the OP would be seeking awakening from a place of a genuine desire to transcend the Earthly... but moreso that he is motivated by a resistance to the Earthly that would be best to stop running away form.

Sadhguru and I are in agreement here. You are love itself. This is why unconditional love is unconditional. And you couldn't stop loving yourself if you tried... because love is your nature. You simply must recognize that the ways you're trying to serve your own best interests are backfiring, and then reorient them in a way that actually serves your best interest.