A Most Authentic Message

[Arkandeus]

2 hours ago, Echoes said:

@Gopackgo Yes, but then why even bother about any non-duality content? Imagine a person that views Leo's video for example and then just waits for a realization without any further investigation into the topic. Not knowing anything about the mechanisms of thought, emotion, the trickiness and capability of ones own self-deception. "Ordinary" Humans are seeking happiness in the future; The seeker is seeking enlightenment in the future. But the seeker of enlightenment comes across many teachers who point to the traps and illusory attempt of the persons desire. Without an interest in the topic or without a longing for truth, one would maybe never come to this guidance and realizations. 

If I tell a friend who never heard about spirituality "Hey, there is only the eternal presence and you don't exist. So to stop suffering just stop pretending to be a human and just BE" I don't think it had any impact at all. Some guidance and pointers are required for most IMO.

it's because spirituality is really that simple :  ''be happy to be, be happy to exist at all'' 

That's everything that spirituality boils down to.
''there's nothing to seek'' translates to:  ''you should be able to be happy right now, you are fully responsible for your happiness''

It may seem not very useful to you but this can be all it takes for a certain kind of people to enlighten. 
There are many different and unique people and many different and unique teachers, if something doesn't connect with you, it will probably connect with someone else. be open-minded that different people require different teachings/ teachers

[Gopackgo]

@zazed If it helps, I meditate all the time. It's a wonderful experience. I just know that there is nothing controlling it. It just apparently arises when it does. Acceptance of no free-will is the hardest one for the me thought. I don't know if it ever fully can accept that its only function is pointless. Its function doesn't exist and never did exist. That's terrifying, but its also true. The apparent conditioning links that to the terror of death. No one knows why something that never happened can bring terror.

[electroBeam]

@jse this video can be summed up like this:

https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D1ChPAO9AYzI&ved=0ahUKEwiX_5HwmInTAhWFq5QKHQH4DIAQwqsBCB0wAA&usg=AFQjCNFcRSaA_eX0NGTKRExp6RABMVjYdQ&sig2=m_DYnzjtQHfYDtL7m7SGow

[Echoes]

@Arkandeus I am. I mentioned Eckhart Tolle as example. But the "you are already enlightened" neo-advaita fraction who ridicules the more "traditional" path seems not so open minded to me personally sometimes. But this should not become a "non-duality war", I agree that for everybody there is a unique way.

[Arkandeus]

9 minutes ago, Echoes said:

@Arkandeus I am. I mentioned Eckhart Tolle as example. But the "you are already enlightened" neo-advaita fraction who ridicules the more "traditional" path seems not so open minded to me personally sometimes. But this should not become a "non-duality war", I agree that for everybody there is a unique way.

you are right, even enlightened people have progress to make. 

..once you identify as an immortal soul your journey begins, rather it continues. 
We came on earth for a reason. 

Eckhart tolle and the guy in the topic's video are only teaching about the first step. 

for anyone interested this video has a lot of good info regarding our purpose as souls on earth
starts at 25:00

 

Edited April 3, 2017 by Arkandeus

[Gopackgo]

@Echoes I think the message that is being put out isn't meant to be received as ridicule. But there's no way to know. There's a good argument that it makes people become set in their ways, but if that is the case, then they would have done that anyways.  I definitely felt the same way for a long time, but it caused me to react by realizing that the reaction arising in me was the me thought. It cause a lot of recognition to occur because it de-idealized the idea that were pulling me out of what is. None of these people have a cruel intent. They usually begin by saying that the talk is pointless because people will do whatever arises in them to do. It makes sense. We are our experiences as they occur in the nothing we are. If we react as a me, then that's what we are until that fades. Then we are whatever arises after that.

[Russell Parr]

3 hours ago, Arkandeus said:

it's because spirituality is really that simple :  ''be happy to be, be happy to exist at all'' 

That's everything that spirituality boils down to.
''there's nothing to seek'' translates to:  ''you should be able to be happy right now, you are fully responsible for your happiness''

Happiness is embedded in dualism, and therefore has nothing to do with spirituality. To seek or desire happiness is to voluntarily step into a battle of opposites, that is to say, to fight against that which makes you unhappy. The best way to be happy is to not seek it at all.

[zazed]

@Gopackgo That's what's the point regarding meditation. Seeking is not really searching. It's more looking inward and experiencing what is. You can do that however you like. He has that buzzing sound, due to his tinnitus, and he loses himself in that. What is that other than meditation, only he does it constantly.

Paul says people should look inward and see, and i quote "You gotta explore, what's here, what's hearing, what's seeing".
That is what meditation is to me at least. It doesn't mean we have to be frantic about it, searching like an obsessed person, then we would be doing it wrong. You just sit and exist. But just being, takes some practice, otherwise we would all be enlightened here, cause we all know the theories. 

And to everyone else:

One peculiar thing i realized today, thanks to Paul's video. Eckhart Tolle's focus on the Now, is maybe a bit too much.
And I like Paul's perspective on how unimportant the Now is. It gives it another dimension. Yes you are living Now, but Now is also meaningless, it's just experience itself. It's gone in an instant, at least, the previous Now is. It has no inherent value either, no permanence. 

Makes you wonder, when this Now becomes the next Now?

Eckhart Tolle writings, may make you obsessed about the Now, trying frantically with effort, to live in the Now. But if you didn't live in the Now Now, you can live in the Now Now, or you can live in the Now Now. And if you didn't live in the Now a second ago, well that is just a story, it's gone. That failure, is not the Now, its unimportant even, forget about it, drop it.
This is where many spiritual practitioners fail, by clinging  with self to the effort, and that is the essence of what he is saying to me at least  

If you are thinking about not being able to live in the Now, you are living in the past. If you are thinking about not being enlightened, you are  living in the past. if you are forcing yourself to meditate, you are living in the future, you are placing importance on future gain and not living in the Now.
Perhaps it's best to meditate naturally, whenever a free moment arises. Instead of going to great lengths to set up the environment for meditation.

Still, the practice is still not without it's benefit in realizing these truth's. That's what the joke is all about.
Once you realize the truth, it all seems without purpose. It will seem ridiculous even.

[zazed]

@Echoes , as @Arkandeus said, it's probably not a ridicule.

Its likely my own self reading to much into it. People (me) tend to become defensive at times.

Watching the entire video and the question session. He is talking to a group of people that came to a specific retreat about this topic. 
That setting alone makes it non-insulting (not that one should ever feel insulted). Other practices are not relevant there, that's not what their retreat is about.

Also, i don't know what non-duality wars are, i only know they are forbidden here  

[jse]

On 04/04/2017 at 4:08 AM, electroBeam said:

@jse this video can be summed up like this:

 

Yes indeed, Adyashanti sums it up nicely.

 

Edited April 4, 2017 by jse

[Gopackgo]

@jse Yea, That's what I've come to realize. Nice video.

 

@zazed There's just no free will. If it happens it happens. Nothing can't have free will. That's the big change in me that has changed my stance. It is so clear that free will doesn't exist. For me accepting that has been really important to defang the "I" thought. All of the second guessing that occurred prior to awakening was an illusion. It is both freeing and terrifying.

[zazed]

@Gopackgo That's an interesting perspective. 
I can appear to make choice, i can deliberate between what i'm eating for dinner. Off course that can be an illusion.

On the other hand, my meditative practices are having since recently already an impact on my professional career.
That would mean, that i was pre-destined to start my practices and have impact on my career.

 

I don't really buy that  . But it's just a semantic thing really, it doesn't really matter if there is free will or not.
It matters most, to realize who has the free will. I believe, the body does have free will, it can have needs, desires and choices based on this.
But i also believe that that body is not really me. And even the I i'm referring to is not me. 

If my true nature, is perception or some similar concept. Then I don't have free will. I'm just looking at a movie happening.
The movie may not be predetermined, and the body has choices, but there is no interface for true being to control the body. So it will just keep on going and choosing whatever it may. 

[Gopackgo]

@zazed Fair enough. Lets look a little more closely. Not to argue, just because I think submitting to this is important. Under the scientific paradigm, you have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. You do not have conscious control over your subconscious mind. This is why in meditation, you are subject to when things happen to pop into your mind.

Scientists believe that the conscious mind can process 40 bits of information per second. Not too shabby, but of all of the conscious processes, seeing, tasting, feeling, thinking, etc, it gets spread thin pretty quick. Now lets look at the unconscious mind. Scientists believe that the unconscious mind can process 20,000,000 bits of information per second. That is 500,000 times what the conscious mind processes. This includes all the things that are traditionally considered unconscious processes, but I would argue that it extends to decision making processes. This is evidenced by the fact that all sensory information is routed first to the unconscious mind, and then to the conscious mind. Occipital lobe, temporal lobe, etc, are located in the deepest part of the reptilian brain. Consider that the eyes are capable of taking in something like 10 million bits per second, I'm not sure if that's the actual number, but there is a huge disparity between the visual system, and the conscious mind. All sensations are constructed into a reality that is then transferred to the conscious mind. This is also evident in those moments when your subconscious perceives a threat, and you react without being consciously aware first (i.e. flinching). It is an evolutionary override that actually removes your volition to move in these circumstances. The same thing happens with fear. It is autonomic and it completely overtakes your conscious mind. Flight or fright is hardwired into the system.

Under this paradigm, it is a stretch to say that the conscious mind is anything other than an output of the entire system. It is the same as saying that a computer monitor controls a computer. Yes, the monitor makes the computer useful, but the image is produced in the computer. When one is in a coma, they lose the heads up display that is reality, but their bodily functions still work. They are still making decisions, but obviously, there is little need to make decisions in interaction. The brain lives on, but the conscious mind is suspended.

This is also evident on the meditation/experience level. When you have a thought, where does it come from? Nothing. It appears from nothing. It just is when it is, you cant miss it. You have no idea what your next thought will be (this is kind of illusion because since your mind is connected, it appears that you are controlling it. This raises the question of the definition of "you". What are you? Most people would say that they are their thoughts, but the problem is that thoughts just appear from nowhere. There is no controlling them. What if the self thought is just the thought which arises after the other thoughts, and claims ownership over them? What if it is the subconsious' way of linking thinking into coherence(albeit sometimes in an ineffective way)? How does the experience of thinking differ in any way from other thoughts? It seems to be one continuous stream. Also, if you have conscious control, as it appears that you do, why cant you consciously control your thought? I mean, people want conscious credit for big life decisions, if they have control, it would seem that they should have the final say in what is in their conscious mind. Where does the decision process actually take place? Conscious mind or subconscious mind? I would suggest that it takes place outside of your conscious mind, and is shot into your conscious mind by the subconscious. So did your conscious mind make that decision? It would appear so if there was always a perpetually subsequent"me" thought, that popped up and says, "I did that". But maybe that me thought also comes from the subconscious mind.

The greatest limitation of the human is the conscious mind. It is the monitor of a reality rendered in the subconscious mind that is uncontrollable (that is unless you have the ability to hold your breath until you die, or to consciously turn off every sensation at will, or maybe to stop your heart from beating). Why would thinking be any different? Thought is just a sensation like all others. It is uncontrollable. The illusion of choice is merely a reaction claiming to be a cause.

I'm not going to get into the Buddhist model, but even if I did, you won't find any refuge there. It's really hard to accept this, but when you really start breaking it down, it is almost unimaginable that it would work any other way. Besides, if it has always been that way and has never bothered people before, why would it do so after discovering that there isn't free will? 

[Gopackgo]

Don't think of it in terms of some third party power on you like predestination. Its motivational drives. When you think you are deciding, you are listening to the subconscious deciding. No one is exerting a force on you, the the self has no control really over what occurs. It just claims to.

[Scholar]

The notion of free will is very intregal for the function of the human, and even of society. You can notice that even in our language we use that notion all the time. When a stone rolls down a cliff, we say "That stone is rolling down a cliff!". We are claiming that the stone is doing something, instead of saying something like "The stone is being rolled down a cliff.".

The stone is not doing anything, the stone is being done to. It is the same with the mind, really. In this sense, the intelligence of any action does not come from us, but from the universe or existance itself. When we look at the stone rolling down, we can actually see that it is gravity that is pulling that stone. The stone doesn't have to do anything but being what it is, and gavity doesn't have to do anything but being exactly what it is. That means we as humans are not doing anything but being humans. A dog is not doing anything but being a dog. Water is not doing anything but being water.

The universe is not doing anything but being the universe, and awareness is not doing anything but being awareness.

Everything is simply exactly what it is. A claim about reality is nothing but a claim about reality, no matter what claim it is. This is precisely why you cannot know what reality is, because the act of knowing is just exactly what it is. Knowing reality is knowing reality, not reality itself. Reality is always just exactly what it is, and knowing will always be just knowing.

 

I have to correct myself. The intelligence of any action is not coming from the universe, but instead from the intelligence of the action. The action itself is simply being an action. The mind tends to define everything with everything but itself. Words cannot define anything but words. Everything is self-defining. Asking what something is, is already delusional.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Scholar

[Gopackgo]

@Scholar I agree, but the scientific intro is a stepping stone to those ideas. It helped me greatly in the beginning. I mean, I didnt have a choice in the matter anyways, but... you know...

 

The funny thing is that I'm in law school. Free will is about the most important concept in law. The supreme court has even mentioned that free will looks less and less like reality. It's so funny.

Edited April 6, 2017 by Gopackgo

[zazed]

I agree 100% on the micro scale. Most thoughts and actions i take are involuntary in the instant moment.
And it certainly is an interesting and abstract view, which from some perspective seems fully correct.
I also don't know how it would help or even matter to me, other than being a fancy theory   

Your also using computer analogies for the brain, trying to say something weak can't control something powerful, as if that means anything.
An old ps/2 port has a max of 12bits/s, plugging in both a mouse and keyboard you can fully control a computer using 24bits a second. Even just showing the mouse cursor move on the screen takes much more processing power, you need to cursor to dissapear where it was, and appear in new places, refreshing the entire screen at 60Hz, which takes in full HD about  2.78 Gbit/s, just to make your mouse move from 12bits/s input. As resolutions increased and pc's became thousands times more powerful, the slow ps/2 port kept working, and can still be used today to control a pc, altough its not always available these days. 

Following your analogy, the computer should make the keys on my keyboard go up and down, and also make the mouse move around.
There is no reason, for a low bitrate device not being able to control something of much greater power.

You can control a forklift with some levers. You exert only little force on the lever and can lift heavy burdens with ease.


On the macro scale. The subconscious mind can still be influenced and trained. Fear reflexes can be trained, some people learn not to flinch for anything. Since starting my meditation practice again recently and sticking with it , i have more willpower. I'm an entirely different person now, and people have even noticed this and commented on it. I'm living less in a haze of automata, and am more aware of what is happening. This awareness brings certain logical flaws to light, which i don't repeat because of this. My automata are also changing, my instant reflexes are beginning to be different from what they where.

I notice this easily in my daily life. I'm suddenly much more detailed at my job. I also do administrative tasks exactly on time, which i always post-poned. I'm also doing things very very far outside of my comfort zone due to this, which I would never voluntarily choose otherwise.

The claim that there is no free will, would mean i could do nothing else than choose to pick up the meditation habit. That it was pre-destined to become better at my work. I had no choice but to enter these forums. And you guys had no choice but to steer me into the direction where my job got better. That may well be. But i don't believe it. Why now, why not two months ago, when i was in a darker place.

Marijuana for example, will definitively impact your choices and the way you live. But does that mean the choice to use marijuana never existed?
If free will doesn't exist, should we tell addicts they have no choice and just to keep using heroin, booze, and whatever they want? It is also a mentality that is not without danger and could be self-defeating, making life a mess. You would say that if the addict decides to quit, its because he had a motivational drive to do it. But why would he decide that, heroin impacts mind and body fully, the only remaining drive is to do more heroin.

And what about those difficult choices, the one's you deliberate over weeks? Or even my dinner tonight, due to time, i was seriously considering getting take out. But i decided not to due to health reasons. But i could almost taste the take-out, and had great desire for its greasy goodness.
Or when i go out to exercise, and my entire body is screaming to stay indoors and chill, but i still go and do it.

What about a computer scientist designing a model.
He thinks deeply and hard about the model he is creating, he makes many many choices in the process. For some he will deliberate for days, for others he might call a colleague for more input. 

I just don't believe it.

I know you can keep going "meta" on everything i said here. You can say i make these seemingly hard choices, because that is what the subconscious is determined to choose. That the mind is set in its way and even the fact of deliberating for days is part of an automata for a hard choice. It's an automatic involuntary process. I understand all your reasoning and theories on it, and it's a logical view. But i don't see the relevance or the importance of it, and I don't think it's true either. I would say, having no free will is the illusion here, and you actually have free will  
I would also say, perhaps many normal people have little to no free will, but increasing your free will is a result of enlightenment work , due to more awareness of the subconscious.

Personally i believe, we are not the body, not the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind, not a voice in our heads, not what we see, not what we hear. We are perception itself. As such, we are nothing in this world, and whether or not something here has free will, should be beside the point. 
Self improvement and the free will to choose to improve, is important only to create a stable environment for enlightenment work.

[LetTheNewDayBegin]

I've watched this video and I got enlightened...

And this:

On 03/04/2017 at 10:19 PM, Arkandeus said:

..once you identify as an immortal soul your journey begins, rather it continues.

totally holds true. It's just a beginning.

Quote

Personally i believe, we are not the body, not the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind, not a voice in our heads, not what we see, not what we hear. We are perception itself. As such, we are nothing in this world, and whether or not something here has free will, should be beside the point. 

Totally agree! I'd add that we are not even the preception itself. We can never pinpoint what we are.

From the empirical point of view, it seems like we have no free will, and scientific studies will confim that. But then, from the empirical point of view, we don't know what the hell is going on anyway.

Edited April 6, 2017 by LetTheNewDayBegin

[Guivs]

 His messages and talks are honest and selfless, plus he is so natural and true in the way he communicates, I love him  !! 

Thanks for sharing @jse  ! 

 

[Gopackgo]

@zazed  Thank you for explaining. My mind was so rational and scientific. It just seems that plugging it into models shows me the holes in the reasoning or the blindspots. That has been the process that my particular mind has seemed to progress. It is definitely better to have almost no thought and just to be. I would have never thought the way I feel now would have ever been possible. It's unreal.