DocHoliday

@thesmileyone Pay me and I'll give you some:P Sry, it would require me to watch them again and currently, I don't really wanna do that.

@Nahm Sure, sure...the question of "Why?" will never lead us anywhere in particular, that's why we generally refrain from asking it because there will always be another "Why?" remaining.

@Nahm Don’t you know better yourself? The realisation that there is no separate self. Now please, don’t start with that “who’s the one to know that”-sort of talk, I’m pretty tired of that to be honest. We really have to come to terms with our absolute and relative understanding. Prior to enlightenment we couldn’t make sense of the absolute but post enlightenment we “gained” the first-hand experience of it and therefore we realised that the relative is and was always incorporated within the absolute all along. But that doesn’t mean that now there is no more relativity and that everything is absolute, that’s stupid and just wrong. There are still distinctions between things and there is still relative knowledge to be acquired and therefore there are still distinct realisations to be made. Or wouldn’t you agree that “new knowledge” for example about your car or about your body in a medical sense is personal and individual to your own finite mind? Enlightenment is highly individual in that sense, it’s not a collective experience just as knowledge is individual and relative.

That’s also quite true. The only thing they have in common is their realisation but apart from that, “enlightened people” can be/are just like everybody else. (Haha, there’s a double entendre in there...)

@Monkey-man Of course they do, that's their thing. When enlightenment occurs, you don't really gain any additional knowledge or insights served to you on a silver plate. The only thing (basic) enlightenment (that is to say the realisation of your true nature) will do for you is, it will show you how the seperate self you thought to be is a complete illusion. Beyond that, there's obviously still a lot more "to do" and to discover because enlightenment is not the end-all-be-all, it's just the beginning. With enlightenment you have kind-of acquired the ultimate tool to sucessfully ask those questions in the most effective way, so that's why it's mostly a completely automatic thing for "enlightened people" to do such inquiry. They want to know simply for the sake of knowing but they don't necessarily "gain" anything from that.

@JustinS Yeah bruh, that's what my signature is about, right there... He should have just let her to it all by herself instead of wanting her to move and be still afterwards:P That's her most profound moment right there, that's her realisation. I've experienced the same kind of non-stop hysterical laughter for like half an hour straight. I just couldn't stop, everytime I looked at anything, especially other people around me, I just had to start laughing all over again as if they told me the most hillarious joke, even though the only thing they did was just being present.

@phoenix666 Not necessarily because you already know too much and even if you should fall back...you will only participate in those activities until they really start to fuck you up - until you pull the brake yourself and you will tell yourself "enough is enough, let's grow up here". But that's juts an assumption, it certainly doesn't always happen this way, but surely most of the times.

@JustinS That's a good question. I personally think it depends whether or not the individual is already living a happy and fulfilled life. When you advertise "the path of seeking" and "enlightenment" to those kinds of people, it will only confuse them and they will be probably repelled by it, but I guess in the end everybody who wants to seek, will ultimately start to seek on their own. That's why spirituality and enlightenment mustn't be preached to others as if it's the thing everybody ought to do. It's normally been said that when the teacher is ready, the student will appear, but I think it also goes the other way in the sense that when the "student" is ready to be taught, he will find the teacher or the teaching, more or less. But as always, "The fool who persists in his folly, will become wise" ~ William Blake. So one way ot the other, at some point realisation (of any kind - not necessarily enlightenment) will occur.

@Joseph Maynor I don't know what that "now" is you're talking about... Might be...might be that it's always changing and staying the same but I don't really care about that to be honest. To me, that's just further mental masturbation, I don't really think contepmlating this "paradox" will bring you anywhere specifically, other than to where you already are now.

I thought I'd post something less controversial today, which involves a very small and simple but highly effective technique to catch yourself and realise that time and especially the past, is not real and merely an illusion and only a dream. The technique involves "watching" yourself as if you would look at yourself in a movie through an exterior camera. So for exapmle, half an hour ago I just woke up here in Germany and made myself breakfast. While I was walking around the kitchen to get all the differnt things I needed, right after I grabbed one thing and walked on, I asked myself "Where was that "you" just 5 seconds ago?" - "Where was that "you" just 1 second ago?", and I let a short movie of that activity that I just executed run in my mind as if there was an exterior camera at the time filming me. I repeated this multiple times just for the fun of it and what will ultimately happen is that this will put you right in touch with the "infinite now" (even though the concept of a "now" still involves (non-existent) time, I know that). So this will to some degree show you that all of this, reality, your whole life is nothing but maya - it's all illusion, it's all happening within absolute consciousness and you're right there, you're right in it. I hope this was helpful to you, I'd love to hear from you guys if you've tried this out for yourselves and want to share your experience.

@Monkey-man Which animals would that be? Never heard of them before, sounds really interesting

@SOUL That's unfortunate.

...and was never born either. I'm watching a lot of Rupert Spira's youtube content right now and at one point he described it in a very beautiful way, comparing life and death to deep-sleep and the waking state, he said (paraphrasing): "It's just the contraction of consciousness in one focused point and the relaxing of it - going back to its source." So this means that while you're in the waking state (awareness is aware of itself), consciousness is focused and compressed on one particular point, which is "you" or your finite mind in other words. In deep-sleep or death, this compression relaxes and falls back into its ultimate, absolute form of being. Therefore the waking state and deep-sleep are just shorter cycles but absolutely identical to the "physical" birth and death of our bodies.

@Epiphany_Inspired Thanks for the compliment, I can totally see what you're saying here:)

@Mighty Mouse Relatively sure

@Mighty Mouse Oh boy, here we go again...

@Joseph Maynor is totally right on this point. If we were to get rid entirely of all conclusions, beliefs and concepts, this forum might just as well be completely empty. It's all maya - it's all fake, but we can't help ourselves to not make use of fakeness, so, (watch out here comes the big conclusion!) it would be best to sincerely acknowledge our thoughts and concepts and just establish distance between them in terms of our identification with them. We cannot under any circumstances be without an ego at any times because even the act of de-identifying with absolutely everything automatically becomes our new identification (the one who de-identifies with everything).

@SOUL Haha. that's exactly what I was saying. But I do indeed apologize if I came off during this discussion as somewhat condescending or arrogant or egocentric because I certainly didn't intend to do so. If I could, I'd give you a hug right now. All is well in the end, right?

@DrMobius Brilliant!

I realise that language is indeed a tricky and difficult tool to use in order to describe what I mean/meant here. There are certainly numerous valid and totally justified points of reasoning from all of you guys. What other way of things happening could there ever be? Surely, you could also say "everything happens as it can happen", but that's once again only referring to the sheer potential of how things can/could happen. But what I'm actually getting at here is the particular occurrence of things that actually "do happen". For example, when one person aggravates and ceaselessly insults another, eventually the one who's been insulted will punch the other one in the face. This happens because it must happen. On the other hand, in case the one who's being insulted is highly advanced in self actualisation and will not take the insults as seriously and decides to not punch him in the face - this also, happens because it must happen in this way, you see? Even vice versa if the self-actualised guy did punch the other guy in the face, that still happened because it must have happened this way. So, again, I'm not talking about the potential of things to happen but I'm talking about the actual act of the happening itself. This is what I mean when I said "things are as they are/everything is as it is". When a tree crashes onto my car, then I guess this is as it is and there's nothing changing that. Of course, one could come in with his (in this case absolute ridiculous and redundant) non-dual argumentation of "Well, it is and it simultaneoulsy isn't, so don't worry about it!". Fuck that, there is a tree rammed into the windshield of my car and that's how it is in this instance, so consequently, the tree falling onto my car happened as it must have happened, there's no way around that. Also, even though I did actually say in my opening post that "everything that could happen, will happen at some point (in consciousness)", I didn't really mean it in the sense that "absolutely everything just has to happen at some point" because in that statement the happening and non-happening of a particular event or occurrence is implied at the same time. So, even if something does not happen, this non-happening is still true to the statement "everything happens as it must happen". I apologize for phrasing it in such a weird way. Therefore, if something appears, it appears as it must appear and when something does not appear, it also does not appear, as it must.

@Serotoninluv That's right, that shit goes deep... that's what pretty much most of the times I'm trying to get across to people anyways.

Indeed a very beautiful video! You might also like this one...

I know that replying to this is kind of equivalent to beating a dead horse, but I'm going to do so anyway. You just don't understand what I'm saying here, that's why I was urging you to contemplate it for a while. In a sense my post was the most redundant post anybody could ever make because in it's essence it didn't really say anything. "You dont even care about the fact that you don't care", means what..? Exactly, you do care from time to time because it so irrelevant to you whether you do so or not. From time to time you do care about enlightenment and higher states of consciousness because, why not? You care about it because you think you can get something out of it, you think it will make your life better in some way and you think it will give you a one-up on everybody else who isn't enlightened, for what other reason would you do it? The pursuit of enlightenment and "higher consciousness" is one of the most egoic endeavours one could undertake. This is why when you simply don't care anymore whether you care or don't care, that is the point of true liberation. It just doesn't matter what you do or don't do because "life doesn't go anywhere". In that sense, @thesmileyone nihilism is what this will leave you with, but it's essentially nihilism taken to 110%, in the sense that all the negative connotations of nihilsim disappear and get converted in their counterpart: pure positivity. Yes, life is absolutely meaningless, yes, there is no point to life whatsoever, yes, it doesn't matter whether you shoot yourself right now or not, but, since we can realize that nothing at all matters, we might just as well care about things and take this game of life seriously. Taking it seriously is part of the game, but you have to come to terms with the fact that in the end, it just doesn't matter. The universe doesn't care about your enlightenment, it doesn't make you any differnt than the craziest, highly neurotic mass-murderer you could find. @SOUL So what? Whether you think that I am full of beliefs or not, does that change anything? And by the way, how could the fact that "everything is as it is" and "everything happens as it must happen" be a belief? It is the most basic and fundamental observation one could come up with (hint to you @Joseph Maynor , you master-observer of the universe:P), because if it would be a belief, there'd have to be a counter-belief to it to contrast it against, saying "everything does not happen as it must happen" and "everything is not as it is". For things to not happen as they must happen, there would need to be a plan accordingly to which "everything must happen" in the first place, thus, this plan is essentially represented by your ego and your desire to manipulate and warp reality accoringly to your preferred paradigm of the world. So, when you say that everything is in its essence perfect as it is, nobody gets offended or hurt by that, should they truly realise it for themselves. Reality just can't play out in any other way than it does. Every choice you make and every decision of yours is essentially already there, that is to say, it is predestined to some extent. The notion of free will therefore only occurs by the fact that reality is in it's essence absolutely infinite. Every choice you make and every decision of yours is essentially already there. @Mighty Mouse You've said it yourself there already. "Nothing as in without appearance." Yes, therefore it can take on any appearance it wants to take on - its possibilities of appearance are infinite. How could it be otherwise? "Nor does adding up countless finitudes ever amount to infinity" -> it's not necessarily about the adding up of it, it's about the mere possibility for the existence of finitudes and that the only possible way for finitudes to exist in the first place, is that they must be derived from the absolute infinite, that is by its nature boundless and includes all finitudes. You see, realitiy is so absolutely infinite that there can never exist anything "outside" of it, since that would make it finite and it would simply "break reality" - it's as if there'd be an "ERROR 404: universe.exe stopped working".

@ValiantSalvatore Yes, those who compete for status and rank are desperately trapped in their lower primal instinctual behaviour patterns, that's for sure. To me, it's just another branch of the survival game manifesting itself. Regarding your final question, yes, that's what I was referring to in my attempt to define the arising of status and rank, so when you get rid of your identification with your ego, then through that, the need to esablish rank or status completely disappears. That's what enlightenment is all about, realising that you are no differnt in any way than the person next to you or your prime minister or head of state or whoever - enlightenment makes everybody equal (as they already are by nature, but the majority of people just doesn't realise that because of self-deception).

@ValiantSalvatore Soooooo much text, dude. I've read like 85% of it hoping that you would arrive at some definitve point you'd want to make or at least some question that people could answer, but, as it seemed as if you wanted to know whether you can break out of the game of rank and status and all that and if there's a fast and effective way to do so, here's my take on that: yes you can "break out" of the game, but as Alan Watts already pointed out you can never quit it. Participating in modern day culture automatically makes you a part of that game, so if you didn't exactly live out in the woods all by yourself, there will always be that game of status and rank since our collective consciousness hasn't been able to evolve past that so far but what you can do is to recognize it for what it is - a game, just as everything else like politics, economy, education, profession or heritage is. It's all part of the ego, that's why people (have to) play it. Therefore, the only way to be less affected by that game, is to break down your ego and get rid of it as much as possible and build up compassion and empathy towards others. Competition and the illusion of status or rank are only then created, when you compare yourself to others, when you put yourself into contrast against others and therefore define yourself in relation to others. Thta's a big part of the ego - so, once you get rid of it, you're free from it.