Orion

Ironically, the most powerful place I've experienced was the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. It's built on an Isthmus and on the intersection of powerful ley lines. The aboriginals used to go there for healing but of course white people usurped it from them. When I entered the center forum I had kundalini awakening like I have never experienced in my lifetime. It felt like I had literally entered a higher dimension of bliss and I was connected to the entire planet. This was completely unexpected and I was dumbfounded. I walked away from the spot and then came back just to see, and the same thing happened. Dead center of the building, right in the middle of the architecture. Just goes to show that the free masons really know about architectural planning. I'd love to visit more state buildings to see if the pattern repeats itself. I would also love to know if there's an accurate map of ley lines out there in the world somewhere. I haven't been able to find one. If there is one it's probably a well guarded secret by the elites. Makes me wonder... if we examine where most of the buildings of power are built in the world, would we find that there are also energy centers there. The only other place where I felt similar power was in Nepal.

Using herbs for spiritual purposes is a sort of spiritual addiction, IMO. Herbs have energetic properties but they are still a material substances and so you are mainly working with the physical body when you use them. The physical body is full of temporary and transitory states, and herbs are just enhancements, like drugs. I can't count the number of spiritual practitioners I've met who had complex herbal practices that they relied on every single day to maintain their spiritual states. I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done but it is rare to find someone who has the knowledge/wisdom of being able to finely balance their body in an individual, unique way every single day, and not get into a formulaic lifestyle where they're just pumping themselves with tonic herbs to feel elevated. The abuse is often subconscious and they don't even realize it... kind of like tea drinkers who just "love tea" but can't seem to avoid drinking it every single day.

I've been to Burning Man before and I've attended many regional parties. I guess I'm a voice of dissent in that I'll never go back. I have never seen such an excessive waste of resources ever in my lifetime. It's just... mind bogglingly unjustifiable. The amount of fossil fuels alone that go into making it happen, I just can't support it anymore. It's white privilege on full display and in full technicolor. (I'm white, before you start making assumptions.) Yes, the art is impressive, but at what cost? In my second and last year I was part of the cleanup crew. There is NO such thing as leave no trace. The Black Rock desert has been irreparably harmed by years of hosting this event. The amount of garbage and ground squall left behind... absolutely sickening. There are so many better smaller events around the world that deliberately limit their numbers and their ethos is about coming together in resource conscious ways. Planet earth should not have to suffer so that narcissistic human beings can have their "mind expanding" experience. It reminds me of people who fly all over the world because they think traveling betters their lives, with no awareness of how jet fuel is ruining the biosphere, or how locals can't even afford to live in their own towns anymore because of foreign money. Burning Man is not a sign of the new era. It's the pinnacle of our age of degeneration. People are literally pouring potable drinking water into the desert just because they can. It doesn't get anymore bourgeois than that.

The bodymind identifications and defense arise out of the original imprinting... where the real-self - or soul, though people have weird associations with this word - begins to believe it is the bodymind and the hard patterning becomes ingrained. I prefer to talk about it in depth with people who are ready to surrender the mind stuff and get at what is really causing their suffering. Most "spiritual" people won't do it because they are stuck in systems thinking or spiritual bypassing of the very issues they claim are no longer affecting them.

It would take a lot of energy for me to entertain scrutiny at this time and I don't really have the energy. Maybe down the road.

I could provide instructions, a framework, and deeper reasoning... but it would take a long time and the process is very personal, depending on the person. I'm not trying to be intentionally vague.

It's not new age... but I'm not going to say where some of my ideas come from because it will engage categorical thinking which will obstruct what we're talking about. Infants in their first year of life don't distinguish between themselves and the other. That forms later through bodymind identifications. Infants are pure presence. Whatever's happening is just what's happening. They don't have the cognition to identify with things as we do during the following periods. This is the original self, the real self. All humans then engage in the process of entering duality by beginning to experience the world. If something keeps happening over and over to an infant, which it will, the infant then begins to experience the world as happening to it and thus duality begins. Whether this engagement is under normal, healthy circumstances (i.e. parental support, safety, nourishment) or through trauma/abuse, the real-self mistakenly learns that the experience IS ITSELF. This happens to all of us, it's part of becoming human. The real-self sort of... folds in on itself, though not really. It always remains whole, it's just an illusion. On some level we realize, oh crap, I don't want to do this, I want to be pure presence, but the false reality has already been imprinted. Please note that the real-self is never fragmented, but it has patterns imprinted on it that create dualistic identifications later on. All body-mind beliefs arise from this original imprinting. We then spend our entire lives trying to reunite with that sense of real-self, through the external world. The benefit is, as we get older, we develop cognitive faculties to investigate where the original patterning happened. Unfortunately, most systems are focused on the body-mind mirages that arise from the imprinting of the real-self, rather than teaching methods of realizing the human level self that wants to be whole and seen. The next evolution is human spiritual systems is going to be along those lines. Rather than endlessly trying to detangle bodymind from pure presence, and rather than experiencing pure presence as emptiness, it will be about a return to real-self origination on a human level without spiritually bypassing into the Absolute. Meditation is not pointless, it has many uses. What I'm saying is that you can't dissolve ego until you have one, and ego will never be absolved until the falsely created (but understandable) reality of the original self is rectified. It's the true root.

Let me rephrase. Formal meditation brings clarity but as soon as you stop the meditation it starts going away. We can use meditation to endlessly look at how the mind operates by bringing us into presence, but the mind is only one component of consciousness. All humans enter the world as a nondual being and this lasts for the first year of life or so, and then we start identifying with the bodymind. The original self begins to take on imprints about reality which later become mindbody-based beliefs. As long as we are only meditating on mind-body identifications, we are not really getting to the root of anything, which is the understanding of where the original self took on a false pattern of dualistic being. This is not the same as dissolving the ego or entering the Absolute. It's an Absolute-as-human experience of bliss without the need to transcend ordinary reality. In short, I'm suggesting that most forms of meditation are not really getting at the root of anything, even though it seems like you are. We know this because even if you can achieve a state of emptiness and inner peace in the meditation, it can be thwarted once the meditation is over. That's because the grounded core that meditation creates is not the true foundation of our being, it's just another temporary state. Realizing the original self is not enough, you have to live from it, as you. It can't be abdicated to the Absolute or bypassed with more bodymind programming. I feel that most seekers of spiritual paths are actually looking for self-reunification and integration, not an Absolute experience, which is why they continue to struggle to find true peace. The way most meditations are proscribed provides no real intimacy with the human level experience. You're just supposed to empty yourself and be content with being an empty vessel, rather than the individuated form that the Absolute came into this world as; a form that has preferences and pathways that make it hum in resonance and others which create dissonance. Any path that tries to homogenize all people rings hollow and it will never bring peace on earth. I have not seen a meditation path yet that addresses the human level core original self. Modern psychology can't do it either.

It can be done but it's been my observation that people who do formal meditations in this fashion are engaged in a form of spiritual bypassing. Most people feel good when they meditate, as they sink into presence and the extraneous bodymind stimulation ceases; but as soon as they leave the meditation they begin to suffering within minutes as they get annoyed, angry or anything else in relationship to their environment. It seems that true healing can never happen as long as you are bypassing your human level experience. Removal of temptation and stimulus is not enough. You need to go back to your origin, to the earliest points in life, when your consciousness was pure presence and not yet identifying with the bodymind. For most people with deep emotional problems, the normal processes of their pure presence real-self beginning to identify with iself vs. the other (the birth of duality) involved sudden trauma. The consciousness then took a snapshot of the trauma continued to play it out throughout life. Delving into emptiness and the Absolute is unlikely to cure trauma in a permanent or long-term way. The human level self must be resolved.

Meditation is a nice bait and switch for a lot of people. Mindfulness is in meditation, and then you "leave" it. But the meditation is always happening. The stillness is always there. When you meditate you're just stillness trying to be still. When you stop sitting there meditating and you go about your day, you just start meditating on other things... like what am I going to eat, where do I need to go, what do I need to do next? Whether it's new agers or religious Buddhist, there's this idea that meditation is going to get you somewhere. It won't. The point of it is to show you what is already present. It doesn't add or remove anything. People who talk about meditation getting deeper and deeper are just duping themselves with their own neurochemical head trip. When you meditate for lengthy periods the body releases all kind of neurochemical cocktails that cause altered states. Then you think you're transcending when really you've started identifying with the body-mind all over again. IMO meditation is a beginner level practice and then that mindfulness must be brought into ordinary reality as you move about your day, otherwise you risk getting caught in a myriad of head trips and notions of achievements. It's a beta wave state, and for deep meditators it's a delta wave state... they're temporary states like anything else. And like anything else, there's no permanently residing there. The mental health stuff like hallucinations and psychiatric episodes from meditation is no doubt due to changes in brain wave state and the resultant effects it has on latent psychoemotional issues. For instance a lot of people with schizophrenia and bipolar only make short visits to delta wave sleep and tend to stick more to beta and shallow sleep; yet if they go try deep level meditation techniques they are forcing a brain wave state which may trigger them. I don't believe science is the be all and end all but one thing that drives me nuts is how some modern Buddhists purport their faith to be really similar to modern psychology and to actually be scientific. That's how they get a lot of modern western followers. In reality they spinning stories about what the different states mean, including discussions about karma, past life interventions, subtle mind, etc. We really must be careful when recommending meditation that we do not start spinning stories about transcendence or "getting some place". If meditation does not center you in the here and now then some other kind of koolaid is happening, whether it's someone else's or your own story about your meditation experience.

I've been learning tai chi for a couple of months now and I'm really enjoying it. I love the physical alignments it demands. My posture has gotten a lot better and I feel a lot more grounded. Maybe I wouldn't win against an MMA fighter even as a master, but I am sure learning a lot about myself and building my confidence in my body. These videos are just a macho pissing contest.

Been meditating on this a lot lately, as I move through my day to day life, having experienced a lot of fragmentation and distortion of my human level personality. I've come at this in two different directions... the top down and the bottom up. Both were through therapies of different kinds. Neither worked. The top down approach, or the "spiritual" approach, is about acknowledging that we are all oneness, or the divine. Or for the sake of discussion, let's say that we all come from starlight. The spiritualists tell us we are all just starlight, and we are not this personality, so there's no real need to suffer. That self is an illusion. How many times have I heard a Buddhist try to cleverly say, "Point to the self. Can you tell me where it is? Where is this "myself" you're talking about?" Yet if you look at a lot of the gurus teaching this stuff, there are hidden addictions, sexual scandals, various suffering. Not in all, but in many. "It's all just mind, this is all Emptiness". So it's not working. We can tell ourselves we come from starlight but it's not making the problem go away. There is a fundamental, human level SELF that is wanting acknowledgement which the spiritualists are bypassing. It's what a lot of "spiritual" people are doing. I've done it. Spiritual bypassing is a major pitfall on the path and it's one of the most insidious illusions a person can face. You need to believe that the $1000 you paid for the spiritual retreat you just went on wasn't a waste of money, so you convince yourself that the system is real and that you've made progress, when all you've done is create a new layer of self-deception that reinforces distortion of the real self. Then there's the bottom up approach, or the modern psychotherapy approach. They tell you that you're being too in your head and that you have to get into your body (in the case of somatics). Or that you just need to re-frame the problem, which is a re-telling of the story, and then once you perceive it differently you won't suffer anymore. Or that you just need to change your environmental circumstances, be more productive, make more friends, etc. It also doesn't work. You feel better for a while, or while you're doing your exercises, or while you're doing your meditations, and then 10 minutes later after you move onto something else, you get triggered. You either pretend that you're not being triggered because you just paid $200 to a therapist to sort it out, or you give up and go back to dissonant living. I feel that the thing that nobody is honing in on is the real self. It's the original you, before you were told that you're a you, that you have a name, an identity. You're born as this self. I'm not talking about universal consciousness or oneness. You come into the world as love wanting to experience life. To put this another way... God wants to live through you, as you. You are an individuated version of the universal consciousness that wants to BE YOU and nothing else. There is something important about this particular configuration that wants to live as itself, and it won't settle for anything else. It doesn't want to be abdicated to an Absolute or overwritten with stories that falsely explain it away. It's one thing to say that we're all starlight but you're actually starlight that has come into living in this particular form, for whatever reason. So you need to live as this real you. No other version will work. You also can't pretend that you're the universe because you're not -- you're you. You are a specific musical note that the universe wants to play clearly and freely. The real-self can never be damaged or tarnished, but it can take on patterns that make the note play less clearly, less profusely, less resonantly. The real-self is born and then starts experiencing the body-mind. It starts to identify with the thoughts of the mind and the sensations of the body that it experiences. It experiences them as itself, when actually they aren't. Various traumas and teachings become patterns that cause the real-self to wall itself off from itself, into a sort of forgetting. On some level you say, "Oh shit! I don't want to do that! I want to be the REAL ME". At this point, most people begin grasping at the external in order to correct this... they go for materialism, or relationships, or "spirituality", or sex. All these things bypass the fundamental problem. The real-self contains its own origin, through all the pain. So underneath these suicidal thoughts, the shame, the insufficiency, or whatever it is that comes up, is a real-self begging to be seen. It's not separate from you. It is you, in a very basic, practical way. It's not esoteric. When someone falls on the street and you go to help them up without thinking, or you put food in your mouth... it's all the real self in motion. There are no thoughts. The real self is the only thing that's present during deep sleep, which is a good way to differentiate it. So I'm at the bank dealing with my accounts and a woman behind me in line starts getting impatient and annoyed. She gives me dirty looks. In the moment I'm thinking, "Whatever, she can wait." But then I leave the bank and I'm driving home, and the thoughts begin. What was her problem? I didn't do anything wrong. Fuck that pissed me off, now I'm angry. What's wrong with me? And so it starts... the dissonance. You start separating from the present moment because there's a pattern in your real-self that is triggered. Somewhere a long time ago I probably learned that it was not OK to hold people up, even if it was about getting my needs fulfilled. Other people come first, and if I don't listen to that I must be a bad person. The real-self, me as this person, learned that the only way to safely BE love in the world is to put other people first. The top-down method would be... we are all just starlight and oneness, and my feelings are temporary. So I don't need to get so distracted by them. Go back into starlight, go back into the oneness, and let it go. I would abdicate this human level experience to the universal consciousness. The bottom-up approach would be to tell myself that the woman was probably just having a bad day, or she hates lineups, or whatever else I need to make up about her in order to feel temporarily better about myself. But that need to feel better is indicating that there is a deeper need not being fulfilled, a wounded pattern that the real-self is holographically duplicating every time there is an impatient person around me. I need to go into the real self (not the body, not the mind) and ask it what it needs, what the solution would be. What do I really want? And the answer I discover is: I want to be loved even as I am fulfilling my needs; I can fulfill my needs and it doesn't make me selfish, it means I love taking care of myself. Bam... the wound dissolves and the light of the real-self shines through. The reason why the inward inquiry contains the solution is because you wouldn't be experiencing dissonance if the real-self weren't already inherently there to setup the polarity. In other words, you're suffering because the real-self knows what you need to not suffer, and you're suffering because you're not living as THAT. The problem with wording this is that it's already setting up a mental thing, when this is not mind related. The mind is actually the obstacle to really seeing and feeling the real-self shine. The real-self examination would be to quiet the mind, enter the heart, and gently ask yourself when the first time was you ever felt this particular way - shame, abandonment, anger, whatever it is... there are many favourites. Eventually you find the original thing... the time when the real-self, which is pure love, learned that it was not OK to be love in a certain situation. It turned in on itself. But paradoxically, the aberration cannot touch its origin. It still remains pure. So as you go into the painful experience that originated the walling off, you experience a burst of light, or energy... the wound begins to dissolve and the real-self shines through. The real you. We all have this kind of forgetting, in some ways. I believe it is part of design. We come in as a pure form and then the stories and layers of confusion begin. The mind-body starts feeling and experiencing things which seem so real, and we are so pure that we assume we are one with those experiences, that we ARE what's happening (identifying with it). It takes getting older and strengthening our human individuation before we can backtrack and figure out where this confusion began. As infants and children it's impossible to do, we're just not developed enough. We can look at the superficial aspects of why people are suicidal - yes the environment plays a role, but some people thrive in adverse circumstances while others whither and die. Being suicidal and ending up in a death knell often has a lot to do with how the real self is being honoured or not. It's not enough to realize how the real-self took on a distorted pattern; it's not enough to realize what the real self wants; you have to actually live from that, every day, in order to really thrive. For example, if you begin to recognize that the real-self really has a thirst for learning, an innate curiosity, a drive to know more and more, yet you make zero change to enrich your life with complex learning, then you're doing yourself a disservice. And maybe along the way you learned the pattern that being curious means getting hurt somehow, or some other pattern. I'm not talking about the inner child. Forget that. Working with the inner child is, in many ways, a road to getting more fucked up. The inner child is usually the first stage of distortion of the real-self, as children start to take on various patterns from experiences and their parents. The real-self is primal, it's #1. You usually know you're in resonance with it because the solar plexus lights up, like a tiny seed of light. You'll know you're breaking through to that presence, through the pain, once you get that nice little belly glow. The truth is that we are universal consciousness. We are also individuals. As individuals we need to honour our unique natures, and not our contrived natures that the world has told us we are. It was to do with your original blueprint, as this person. It's the you that you've always wanted to be, the only one you care to be. And once you recognize this real self again, you won't long for anything else. I strongly feel that being suicidal is about this. A core self seeking its own essence, through the lens of distorted patterning. The distortions create dissonance through being triggered, and then the dissonance leads to an internal sense of self-separation and falsehood, which becomes anti-life. Fortunately the solutions are already inwardly available. It takes acknowledging what the original you wants and needs... what the green lights are for you in life, rather than the yellow and red lights. Spiritual systems and modern psychology are not addressing this adequately. Most are facilitating the person to bypass the problem by reaching for better feelings or better stories, rather than training in recognizing the real individuated consciousness that wants to live as its truest form. It's not enough to say that desire causes suffering. Suffering is created by the dissonance of living inauthentically. If we all lived according to our true nature, the individuated nature we came into the world as, I believe attached suffering would cease. Recognizing and living as your real, truest self is to live in bliss. It doesn't have to be anymore complicated than that. If you're not in the present moment, if you're not content, if you feel dissonant and not in your body, if you are triggered, then you are being pointed to your freedom through the pain to your original you that wants to live as nothing other than you.

Language.... it's a tricky thing. The real self is not the experience of no self though. You can never really be just no self. You can experience the simultaneous duality (and perhaps unification) of the real self with the All, but one cannot sublimate the other. There is a human life in here that wants to be what it wants to be, individuated. I am not talking about personality level desire or the ego. It is actually easier to experience the real-self when the ego is softened. It is more subtle than that, and more powerful. I have found that trying to be wu wei before it naturally evolves only leads to health problems. What modern psychotherapy does is create extraneous layers upon the real self... it builds structures upon something that does not need more structures. All that something wants is acknowledgment and authentic living. In any case, you can't abdicate a real-self, not while you're alive. The real-self knows that it comes from divine origin (for lack of a better term), but it wants to be the divine through the vehicle of its own unique nature. I'm not sure what you mean about there being no conflict between developing the self and dissolving the self. There is nothing beyond, or underneath the real-self. You can't dissolve it or add to it. There's nothing to tear town. It's just there. It's you. It's the experiencer, but not in a wu wei way, in a way that is unique to each individual. We all have a real-self but each real-self is playing a slightly different tune and only wants to be that tune. On the contrary, the real-self makes 100% sense. If you live authentically from it, you feel bliss. If you don't, you feel dissonance and suffering. The suffering comes from denial of the real-self authentic nature, either by willful ignorance or through patterned distortion.

You're welcome. I just wanted to add... I don't mean to sound denigrating toward modern psychology or various spiritual systems like Buddhism. I am just detailing why they didn't work for me to repair my human level suffering. There's nothing wrong with experiencing universal consciousness or emptiness, I just think we have to feel whole as humans before we get to the dissolution stage. To coin the chakra model for a second... traditionally in kundalini practices, you sort out your lower chakras before getting into the upper ones. The lower three are where most humans get stuck. For me the lower three are best addressed through real-self acknowledgment. If you try to get into the transpersonal levels of consciousness before your human level self is resolved, it could fuck you up further. I don't personally believe we can bypass the real-self without suffering consequences. We all experience distortional patterning of the real-self by virtue of coming into this human realm with all of its sensorial experiences. The degree of distortion depends on the personal experiences. Maybe this is by design, or by karma, or it's random -- hard to say. Regardless, the reason is not relevant because focusing on the solution - i.e. what does the real self want and need to feel its own wholeness - will enable the real-self to emerge through the distortions. I feel that regardless of a person's path in life, whether mundane, magical, spiritual, or transcendental, the real-self path has to be established or one part of the spiritual duality will remain dysfunctional and will not later be able to achieve blissful unity with the All. In other words if you aren't living as the Brahman intended you to live, as you, then it will be hard to integrate divine experiences into your human level existence and you will continue to suffer on a very human level. The more I recognize and realize this, the more I see some of the real reasons for human suffering in the world across the board. If the real-self recognition is not happening; if the real-self is not the source of one's movement through life, then not only will their life force not be strong, they will also grasp endlessly at external forms in order to try and fill that void.

IMO it works sort of like gym elixirs do, on an energy level. The material level effects are probably negligible, though it's all interconnected so who knows. Would be interested to hear your experience report TaoMeow.

Is the ringing in both ears, or just one? Based on what you said about jaw clenching and ear ringing, it sounds like there is improper pressure being placed on your cranial nerves, maybe due to a neck injury or a misalignment of the skull bones. Look for an osteopath who does craniosacral and facial bone adjustment! Trust me! Btw traumatic injury is the 4th reason for ear ringing. Forgot to mention that

There are generally two types of tinnitus in TCM... excess type and deficient type. The deficient type sounds like whooshing water and is intermittent. It's due to not enough qi reaching the ear. The excess type is a constant, high pitched sound that rarely stops. It's due to hyperactive yang qi rising up, usually do to internal heat that is not balanced with yin in the kidneys and liver. It's usually related to hormones or intense emotions. There is a third type of excess which is due to infection... it creates heat which surges upward, but it doesn't sound like you're dealing with that one. I've known people who have corrected their tinnitus with osteopathic and craniosacral pressure therapy. Sometimes the plates of the skull are misaligned and they need to be put back into place, especially the temporal bones.

Forgiveness is only worthwhile when it's authentic and sincere. If your forgiveness is actually pushing something unresolved deep down within yourself and denying your own anger because it's the "right thing to do", then your forgiveness is actually codified and toxic. I say if you can't forgive and you truly feel hateful, then abide there. It's more honest and more real then pretending to be something you're not. It's when we don't acknowledge hate and anger that they consume us. I also agree that some things cannot and should not be forgiven. It may not be my place to forgive someone. It may be out of my league or not my business.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that suffering and neuroses don't end just because you awaken to presence. You still go through them, but with the awareness that you don't have to identify with them. There's no one in here driving this reality. It proceeds of its own accord, like a never ending ticker tape stretching on into the horizon. Grasp or don't grasp. Take action or do nothing. It proceeds anyway. There's no escape and nowhere to go to. It's all happening right here and you are in perpetual free fall through it. There are no proscriptions for how this should work. Whatever's happening is what's happening. So the bad news is that you're falling forever. The good news is that there's no bottom. And even better is that you're not falling alone.

It doesn't seem like awakening or realization changes the body-mind right away. The body-mind just takes place in the presence of the realized self. Over time the body-mind and the self sync up, but maybe not. We can't be too formulaic in how we discuss this. IMO the biggest obstacle to understanding how this works is attachment to the idea of what it means to be perfect. Being enlightened may not mean being the salt of the earth. It might look a lot differently than your mind has setup an expectation for. It might mean an outwardly seeming flawed being but an inwardly integrated self.

I thought that yawning was engaged when the parasympathetic nervous system comes into play, meaning you're relaxed and receptive. Yawning happens a lot in meditation for the same reason.

He Shou Wu is hepatotoxic long-term. The Chinese just started admitting to it in the past 5 years now that their elderly are taking it for everything under the sun. It causes veno-occlusive liver disease if you take it more than 8 weeks straight, whether it's in a formula or not. But to answer the OP's question... yin within your body that can't integrate becomes dampness, and excess in general turns to stagnation. People who take shou wu long-term might have more lush hair but their qi dynamic is messed up. If you look at historical uses, most people in China didn't have access to regular jing tonics. If they were lucky they could get small amounts and use them for a week or two to bolster the body. If they were wealthy they could hire their own personal herbalist to prescribe for them, modifying the formulas every week for their ongoing bodily changes. In modern times we even live in herbal excess. I would say short term uses only, unless you are eating ones considered food like goji. Even then, getting too fixed on something isn't good generally.

Recently I was talking to a small group of people and the question was posed, "How do you know what real love is?" Intense discussion ensued. But how do you discuss an experience which is felt and not thought of, that is either there or not, and that you know when you see it and requires no qualifier? Enlightenment is a carrot that is dangled before believers while they still need concepts, when really there is no goal.

Obviously a copy and paste job. Source?

There are other factors at work now, like the world's ecology. We don't have much leeway anymore to experiment with our failed socioeconomic systems. As the natural resource burden increases, we won't have a plan B. Even the rich who are stockpiling wealth into assets are not going to be able to escape the inevitable ecological collapse we are headed for. We don't have the tech to make offworld colonies, we are stuck here. Nature is going to trump all this mental masturbation. Fact is, we have too many humans on the planet, most of whom are vying for the same standard of living. It's destroying us. Capitalism doesn't work. Everyone is basing its successes on the short term gains we have seen in the past 150 years. Let's bear in mind that it has only been the past 40 years, IF THAT, that anyone has cared about our impact on the environment. Everything we have created will easily come undone and put us back in the stone ages, or worse, if the ecology collapses -- which it will, and is already. The human race was just fine until Europe came along with its materialistic values. Almost every other culture on the Earth was living more or less in equilibrium with nature. The agricultural methods of North and South American natives, tied into the ecosystem, were 100% sustainable because they didn't care about profit. That knowledge is lost. We are effectively becoming a global mono-economic culture which is dangerous. Diversity thrives, singularity dies. The pockets of diverse knowledge which could save us are going extinct year by year. We are totally screwed. Humans will survive but this capitalist era will be a footnote. Nature will see to it.