Enlightenment questions

[Neptune2020]

"Sit comfortably and quietly, still your mind, and become aware of direct experience.

Locate a distant object in your visual field. Any object will do, like a tree, a car, a sofa, a lamp, a book.

Now ask yourself, "What is separating ME from this object?"

Notice that the space or air in the room is actually unifying you and the object, rather than separating you two.

Notice that EVERY object you see is unified into one field of awareness.

The space or air connects "you" to everything.

Become directly conscious of this until you can feel it."

 

I did self-inquiry and did a exercise similar to this. I discovered that I was unified with said object, and that it wasn't air that was dividing us. I asked myself what is between me and the object and answered "air" and that asked myself other than the air what is between the object and answered nothingness and since nothingness has no shape size weight or attributes that I must be connected to the object and then had a small bit of awareness then I lost it. How do I get it back? Now when I think about it and look at my keyboard I think " Connected? How are we connected that thing is not a part of you" and there are all these ego and mind barriers, what do I do?

If all we have is perception and reality is perception this must mean we are reality, but I can't experience any of this in real-time? None of this makes any logical sense. I'm trying to find enlightenment but can't find it. How do you experience nothingness if there is nothing to experience? Maybe I am confused. For fellow actualizers who have become enlightened how long did it take? What steps and processes did you use? Are there more advanced stages of enlightenment?

 

Edited July 3, 2018 by Neptune2020

[Bill Eichman]

6 hours ago, Neptune2020 said:

then had a small bit of awareness then I lost it. 

What was this awareness like? How well do you remember it? Could you describe it?

Are there more advanced stages of enlightenment?

There were for me. The sequence of early ones fused together, eventually leading to a complex systems capacity that, when I realized what to focus it upon, generated a change that divided my life into before and after. It is ongoing, expanding continuously, radically unexpected, survives every test I throw at it and every attempt to falsify it, and it is utterly convincing, subjectively at least.

I could describe it in detail, but, those descriptions would be generated by my verbal minds and passed to you in text compression, received by you, then processed in your verbal minds and then assessed by you using a variety of minds. And none of those ordinary baseline human minds involved in that process, neither mine -- altho mine have been modified and trained to do exactly this type of thing -- nor yours has the ability to know, understand, model, or endure what I will momentarily call "enlightenment minds systems 'thought' " (I call it 'thought' to communicate about it, but it is not thought in the sense we typically use that word.)

One learns to be comfortable with paradox. 

We can return to this.

If all we have is perception and reality is perception this must mean we are reality, but I can't experience any of this in real-time? None of this makes any logical sense.

Perception is not all you have. "Reality is perception" has a few flaws which will give you problems, not the least of which is the "is of identity". Another problem appears here in "must mean we are reality". I'm sorry, but your code is broken, to use a metaphor for communications sake. Look at the sequence of statements, and test them. Assess their accuracy.

 I'm trying to find enlightenment but can't find it. How do you experience nothingness if there is nothing to experience? Maybe I am confused.

I am going to make a prediction.

No amount of experience of nothingness will produce a state with lasting traits of "enlightenment", using either my complex system models of "enlightenment", or using the traditional "moksha" models of "enlightenment", or using the non-traditional modern popular models of "enlightenment". With one exception, the raw endurance exception, but that exception would take you more than ten years to implement.

I wonder if you are using the word "nothingness " to mean consciousness without an object?  Which is  definitely  notnothinghness, but it might seem like nothingness.

For fellow actualizers who have become enlightened how long did it take?

A long time. But I took the scenic route.

What steps and processes did you use?

All of them.

You are asking me to write a LOT of stuff here.



 

 

 

[Nahm]

8 hours ago, Neptune2020 said:

How do you experience nothingness if there is nothing to experience? For now, take comfort in the honestly and freedom of simply not knowing. 

Maybe I am confused. That’s a great place to be. 99% of people are asleep, no confusion there. I like to think of confusion as static inbetween radio stations. We move through it to understand the next frequency. (Loose analogy)

For fellow actualizers who have become enlightened how long did it take? What do you mean by enlightened? 

What steps and processes did you use? Are there more advanced stages of enlightenment? Use all of them. That’s the only way to discover what works for you. The path is relative to each person, because each person is coming from their own unique place. 

 

[cetus]

8 hours ago, Neptune2020 said:

If all we have is perception and reality is perception this must mean we are reality, but I can't experience any of this in real-time?

@Neptune2020 As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only. Dimensionless and timeless centers of observation and than realize that immense ocean of pure awareness which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

Your being a person is due to the illusion of space and time. You imagine yourself to be at a certain point occupying a certain volume. Your personality is due to your self identification with the body. Your thoughts and feelings exist in succession. They have their span in time and make you imagine yourself because of memory having duration. In reality time and space exit in you, you do not exist in them.  -Nisargadatta

[Hotaka]

I don't know what nothingness is but I experience it anyway, it is like saying I don't know what anything is so I won't say anything, or else you could be speaking and know nothing, which you can (but really you know something, but not in words), so you can be in the imagination of saying you as an appearance cannot actualize the concept of self-otherness-dissolution as a manifest-internal-experience while ignorant that all you need is a shift-in-belief as it-is-outside that you are in enchantment apparently separate by keeping-inside-alive (body awareness as a surface is actually obstructive to unity). Catch, it is you who is creating the separation, like if you are in the water and splash around you think you are somehow moving water yet it constantly fills you and if someone is in the water it rises, so it needs no self, and then with that dissolution it being less undifferentiated and comfortable with nothing and accepting that you know nothing without consciously having the magic script that claims this and confirms this outright in your experience like a full blown enlightenment. You hold it  as a nothing in the background knowing it but not identifying it onto a surface of thought which is the opposite of presence of knowing nothing through the nothing within you, which permeates you and the object all the time, making you very much alike and almost identical if you can learn to be with nothing  (mindless meditation) which is like knowledge as a state of being rather than an identification onto a form of a separate identity, which although alive, is now separate and different from undifferentiation of nothing as it is.

[Bill Eichman]

Perhaps we could talk about something like a 'use case', that is, about putting the ideas that you are describing into practices from which one hopes for various types of results.

Are you choosing objects to be the nothing? Or yourself? Or words. Or the fabric of spacetime?
e
Are you familiar with the expression "form is void", the mahayana buddhist teaching of the emptiness of existent things, based on a book called the Heart Sutra? Do you think this might be the origin of the method you are talking about?

Could you desceibe a practice in action, and how it is supposed to work?

[Neptune2020]

@Bill Eichman Hi Bill, I used this technique from Leos Practical guide to enlightenment:

 

 

I used Exercise 2 Noticing Space As Unitive

"Sit comfortably and quietly, still your mind, and become aware of direct experience.

Locate a distant object in your visual field. Any object will do, like a tree, a car, a sofa, a lamp, a book.

Now ask yourself, "What is separating ME from this object?"

Notice that the space or air in the room is actually unifying you and the object, rather than separating you two.

Notice that EVERY object you see is unified into one field of awareness.

The space or air connects "you" to everything.

Become directly conscious of this until you can feel it."

 

I am not sure of the origin of the method, Leo may know. I was just using objects to find unity, I am blindly following these techniques with no prior background or enlightenment work except for a Do Nothing Meditation schedule (20 minutes a day) from Shinzen Young. Intellectualy I think I can understand what nothingness is but I have not experienced it. I am thinking of it as conciousness without an object.

[Bill Eichman]

If I recall correctly, that's an advaita practice, or a modification of an advaita practice from modern times,  that builds the habit of awareness of unified whole systems and experiences. There would be practices that follow this.

Our society prepares us to be workers by teaching us the opposite, to ignore whole systems and to focus on things as separated parts, especially ourselves.

Did you do that practice much? It has a few pretty distinctive results. One would be that in almost any situation, you would be able, if you chose, to relax in one specific way and change your sensorium, which is a name for the bubble of perception that you paint onto what is around your body. The exact qualities of the change would vary from person to person, but it would probably include something like the appearance of networks of waves or lines or possibly tints or glows, indicating dynamics and connections, and a change in the sense of sounds from focus on alerts and communication sounds to an awareness of sound concentrations as an indicator of things like emotional charges carried by the beings in the observed space. (Sound and our sense of sound can do hugely more than we think it can do, in terms of carrying information and being a part of thinking and sensing and acting upon the world around us. )

Hey man, I want to point something out. In what I just said, I am using a somewhat tedious technical language that's meant for making fine distinctions about what is observed and about the changes that occur in people that do practices. I could have said the stuff about the results of the practice another way. But, if I did, it would communicate as talking about 'occult powers' or psychism. Which is what it looks like, there is some truth to that. It's important, though, not to lock yourself into ways of seeing things. If you instead make the effort to simply describe what is experienced with specific details like "a change in awareness of sound concentrations", that helps in keeping focus on what you directly experienced, and not the stories you tell yourself about what you experienced.

So, if you did the practice you showed me a certain number of times, one result there's a reasonable chance of getting is sensorium changes like what I described above.

There would be other results. Did you get any of the other results, do you know?

 

[Guest Quanty]

Heal the body first, heal the pathways within the body to a full cycle, not only heart and head. 

After one heals the body, reality will unfold permanently. 

Start with the Breath. Embrace the pain and don't look back.