stirling

Which secret are you after? The scrolling and book-reading is often a barrier. It could be that what you are looking for isn't knowledge in the conventional sense. I actually think that the course description tells you what you might need to do to get the benefits of the "Challenger" level for free: "100 Day Meditation Challenge". Anyone doing this will absolutely benefit in the described manner, as long as the practice that is the way IN to the meditation is dropped once understood. 100 days of meditation, depending on how that is done, is very likely to establish a good foundation. In-person work with a dedicated teacher that has a real lineage would also be worth consideration. The practice is the path. Establish a practice, and you have a path. If you are really drawn to this, DO it. It may still be a cul-de-sac. This is also part of the "path".

Just to restate my point: I AM the best person to make this claim. I have guided many students down this road. Anyone who chooses to dedicate this amount of time could do this for themselves... these claims are not at all extravagant, in my opinion. Notice - I make no claims about the efficacy of the program.

Taoist and Buddhist masters can (and do) easily share stories about the one true "attainment" and understand each other perfectly. Being in alignment and being "enlightened" are not different - merely described from different perspectives. It is only in having no-self that one can be in alignment.

What is your intention? What do you want from such a course? These things: 100 days meditation challenge One Powerful Exercise Train your mental body daily like in a Gym Boost concentration and effectiveness Develop mental clarity ...can be accomplished by anyone with the discipline to meditate in open awareness daily for a month, let alone 100 days. There are teachers everywhere that would guide you in such an endeavor for free. There IS no "secret". Dharma is everywhere, has never been hidden, and costs nothing. What is actually fundamentally important is utterly simple, though few will have the discipline or trust to try it.

I agree with Jamgon Mipham, but I am attempting to demonstrate his point by looking at it from another perspective. The point he is trying to make is that things are empty of intrinsic existence - meaning do not have an existence of their own as separate things. This means that they have a certain "unreality". I am suggesting that, if there is no "self", there is no-one for experiences or objects to belong to. Both are correct - one is looking at things from the lens of collapsing "space", the other through the lens of the collapsing of "self". I have also used something along those lines when I am deeply suffering. I have used it as a means to maintain 100% presence in the moment, which tends to minimize suffering. It works!

No. Terminate implies a self that "owns" emotions, or controls them, which doesn't ultimately exist. Emotions don't belong to "us" any more than any other phenomena that arises or passes. If anything emotions are more deeply felt after awakening, though they are not freighted by the iterative thought process that lengthens their stay or causes more intense suffering.

Practice can take a lot of forms. Reading or chanting a sutra can be practice, but could also be considered analytical in some respects. It is a good idea to have some idea of what the philosophical constructs are around the understanding of enlightenment, but it is also any easy place in Western culture to get lost. You are very unlikely to read your way to enlightenment. My feeling is that the scholar who reads and writes about sunyata is much less likely to recognize that it is present in this moment than the practitioner who regularly rests in it with deep familiarity. I am currently working in Soto Zen. My longer background is in Nyingma/Dzogchen.

"If you can refrain from hoping, you can bring yourself entirely into the present moment and discover the joy that is already here." - Thich Nhat Hanh

We already dropped this ages ago. This is a point YOU keep making… your debate. Put your stick away and witness a happy elephant. 🙂 Just to add - you are heard. I hear your point of view, and don’t begrudge you having it. I am merely saying that it is obvious that the insight is the same regardless of how you arrive at it TO ME.

Does the Buddha deny a creator? Does he say he is an atheist? Does he claim to be able to prove that there are no gods? Or, is it simply a difference of emphasis?

This is entirely anecdotal, but every time I have had to please to hang out with some of our Indian friends or work acquaintances (almost all of whom are Hindu) they slaps me on the back when I tell them my Buddhist background and tell me I am really a Hindu anyway.

The teachings are equally true (in that they point to the same insight) but ultimately untrue in that they are just teachings and not "it". I embrace both of their "truths".

I embrace the non-dual portions of the Hindu teachings. Cosmologies, hierarchies, dieties, etc. I put no stock in. I have zero doubt that "Self" and "no-self" are the same, but spoken about differently. Emptiness and no-self ARE eternal, just as "Self" would have to be.

Depends on what you mean by "refute". The buddha himself says that the dharma (teachings) should not be clung to after realization: Later teachers are on record saying that "awakened mind" has no relationship to the teachings. There are plenty of statements like this - I just can't remember them all.

There are words to describe the realized in all traditions. Realization doesn't pertain to a title, ultimately, and this would be clear to "anyone" who is realized. What is MCO? Either way, a discussion on this topic is really unimportant... siddhis in general are just entertainment really - not a path to anywhere. You have some very fixed ideas. You will find that are ultimately counterproductive. That's another dodge. You don't have the understanding to make such a supposition, so why pick a fight about it? For someone who doesn't value "non-dual realisation" you sure spend a lot of time arguing about it - do YOU really know why?

Realizing the "Self" is realizing the emptiness of "self", and vice-versa, its just a question of semantics that are, like all conceptual nonsense, meaningless. Haha! You caught me out! Why so much barely concealed bile? All appearances in consciousness (including you and I) are paper tigers. Why would "non-dualists" or “being fully present in this very moments” get a pass? I don't know that it helped or didn't help, but I AM certain you are giving short shrift to intention and its power, whether the results are obvious to you or not. Why would the "non-dualists" or “being fully present in this very moments” make you cranky?

...WHAT bee?

I think of it like this: Imagine it is 6AM and there is a still, empty playing field. If we come back at 9AM and there are kids playing a game, parents looking on, a food vendor. There is the story of winning or losing the match. A girl catches a teenage boys eye - what happens next? Food is handed to a parent and money is exchanged. A bird chases another bird. A bee alights from a dandelion, The story of the world plays out on the field, but always underneath is the "stage", the still grassy space where it plays out. The story needs the omnipresent "space" to play out in. The story arises from the "space" itself, and dissolves into it again when elements of the story, or subplots dissolve. The story, relative reality, is in constant flux as elements come and go, arise and pass, always present in this moment but completely gone when they dissipate. The field, absolute reality, is always there, an empty canvas where the story can manifest. They are never truly separate - not a duality, and yet the bottom layer is always the absolute, unmanifest and unchanging. Meditation is relevant as a tool because we can watch relative reality and see its impermanence manifest in real time. With practice our "story" starts to drop out for brief periods. We can see glimpses of the substrat - the dharmakaya, the absolute. The difference between the two? The absolute is ALWAYS present. If you let the relative drop out, the absolute is always there, still and quiet. This is the entirety of the wisdom. Even with "no-self", the story continues, BUT there is deep and permanent seeing of the absolute, always present, always the container and generator of the story, flavoring the relative in ways you never imagined. The feeling of needing to chose is something we can relax about. Things just "are". Even the duality of the relative and absolute dissolves and is resolved.

Fan-fucking-tastic! Deep bows to you, Steve.

Yes, I understand. Realization IS a transmutation of your understanding of everything. Not an actual change to anything except how things are seen. I honestly think the story of neidanism, or Jesus fit perfectly into non-dual understanding. Christianity has a number of non-dual pointers, IMHO. Those with real non-dual realization at the level of "no-self" don't devalue anything that arises, but rather want to be helpful and see suffering diminished. Any well-thought out philosophy is just a new story in duality. A Nondualist walks into a bar where a man shining with ineffable light is drinking a beer, everyone in the bar is astounded and thinks they are seeing the face of God, and the realized being smiles at the sheer beauty and variety of experiencing in this moment. I honestly don't know where you get all of this. Forgive me, but you seem so bitter, like realized beings are Nazis that stole the bread out of your house and burnt it to the ground. What is it that makes you so angry at the "non-dualist" paper tiger? Siddhis can be useful. I know teachers who use their psychic ability to read students and better help them have insight into themselves. I know realized teachers that have gone to protests, helped in villages in Puerto Rico, ministered to the Tibetan diaspora and more. What on earth would make you think that a realized being sits by and watches others in their proximity suffer? It is absolutely the opposite. Realized beings help where they are. One of my late transmitted teachers did distance healing. I don't know that it definitely worked or didn't, but she felt it did and her intention was absolutely to be helpful. She had lived for many years without a house. She regularly went to the shelters to help, and one particular hospice for the unhoused who were dying and just spent time with them. She was intensely, fiercely kind. This anger and resentment in you is definitely something worthy of your investigation.

I dunno what he is going on about there. Realization is that there is no "there" there. Perhaps this is the offering of some relative practice as skillful means? I sit with an authorized teacher of the late Katagiri Roshi and he also says that he received instruction to watch the breath sink on the inhale down to the "hara" as a practice. No great emphasis on it, but just received it one day in dokusan. That would be a non-dual teaching. Pointing, I think, at "nowness", perhaps?

Right. Thanks Steve. We can say that reality is non-dual, but non-duality is another concept. Vajrayana Buddhism would say it is Sunyata, but this is yet another concept. "Reality" is not only empty of things with intrinsic existence, but it is also empty of conceptual ideation. It cannot be described, only pointed to. The closest I have ever been able to come to my satisfaction is: There is THIS. It is HAPPENING NOW.

Why? This is always the toughest question. I would guess that there is a point where there is enough clarity to see through your misapprehension of how things are permanently. From that point on you notice when subtle dualities in experience arise. The simple noticing makes them dissolve. It seems you have to either be a person who has relaxed ideas about things, or someone who has had the experience of letting go of major obscurations to suddenly see it. Once seen, everything is relative to the non-dual understanding. It illuminates all questions you might have had about reality and makes them irrelevant. You are correct - there is no-half baked version of this insight. No. Major obscurations arise in life all of the time. We can work with them a number of ways. Having some indeterminate number of them out of the way makes us "accident prone" for non-dual insight. After insight it is actually the insight ITSELF that shows that they aren't based in reality and makes them dissolve. It isn't a psychological process. Awakening is like seeing that the Wizard of Oz is just a guy behind a curtain. Once seen, you can't unsee it - all arising obscurations are realized to be toothless phantoms once seen in perspective.

In Buddhism all appearances, be they thoughts, feelings, objects, etc. arise in the dharmakaya. You can choose a different more divided story for how it works, but in the end I don't think the cosmology matters. You can spend a trillion dollars, but your question won't be answered. The subtle form of a fear is a duality. Examples such as a fear that there are phenomena that aren't "Self" that could effect you, or, in Buddhist terms, fear of phenomena that have some intrinsic reality (belonging to them"selves"). Even the thought of "premature non-duality" or "premature kundalini" is something that would eventually be dropped, because don't ultimately make any sense from the non-dual perspective. I understand that this isn't going to make sense. My suggestion is to hold this lightly too. Anyone with non-dual realization is going to tell you that it is the absolute reality. Buddhisms explanation of this is the "Two Truths Doctrine", where both exist, but the Absolute Truth includes and supersedes the Relative Truth. https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-the-two-truths/ A subtle body is possible, just as ghosts, gods, and bigfoot are possible (or even real), but none of these have any real bearing on understanding the Absolute or real gnosis. What "we" are is immortal, for example, but not from some transmutation of the body - from an understanding that what we are is NOT a body... it is all pervasive awareness, nothing that corresponds to an object. Many non-dual realized "yogis" of various traditions have some level of siddhis, though few will talk about it. Many of the siddhis are real too, but not ultimately of any import.

That's certainly a harder landscape to traverse. Not accepting the possible outcomes (or better still, being open to whatever the outcome is without fixed ideas) is an approach I would agree with. Grasping and expectations are impediments. A more relatable way to look at it might be that the separate things, people and experiences you have should be considered somewhat dreamlike. In the same way it is good not to cling to a particular outcome. I would also suggest not clinging to stories or models about how things are (cosmologies, science, Buddhism, Shaivism, etc.), but rather hold them lightly as possibilities. Even YOUR story.. or mine. As I teen I had an incredibly real dream about an angel named Obethron that would help me if I ever got lost, or wanted to grow spiritually. This dream was WAY outside of any belief system I had or have. Still, over the years I would remember and ask Obethron for help, just as I would ask Padmasambhava or Amitahba later. Sometimes I felt I WAS being helped. I always held these beliefs as lightly as possible. I can't say for sure that any of these symbols in consciousness were helpful, but also can't say they weren't.