Lucky7Strikes

Thanks for not plastering quotes. I like this shorter back and forth. Let's keep it this way when we discuss this issue. I don't want us to write pages of quotes and replies. I don't think it's necessary, especially since you are awakened and have a very clear mind. IMO your reply shows that you haven't really thought about this that much. If you awake in a dream, are you dreaming anymore? Also, is "no longer being deluded about the dream" an appearance, or is it referring to something recognizing the dream as delusional? Your answer is probably not the latter. So if it's an appearance, then it is also illusion. So now the distinction between delusion and illusion no longer make much sense since there is no one to be deluded about something. Your "enlightenment" according to your ideas, is just another appearance! So why do you say something is deluded and something is not deluded? p.s. you realize you can manipulate the ordinary world just like the dream world. The dream tiger can kill you too: you wake up on your bed and you are no longer in the jungle.

Is being "no longer deluded about it" also illusory?

Do these five wisdoms arise as appearances? There is no difference between cognition and appearance you said right? Than what makes the wisdoms any less illusory than ignorance?

What do you mean appearances perceived through wisdom when there is no separation?

Before I reply to your larger post, I want to just focus on this point. All appearances are illusory, but your understanding is either deluded or not. So what is it that separates appearances with that which understands appearances?

I'm not saying my happiness is complicated. But that the understanding of happiness is very diverse for people, and hence it's not as simple as "you'll know bliss when it comes." There are many types of bliss experiences, feelings of being home, a heart centered compassionate bliss, the rise of that sort of energy, or a mental nongrasping bliss that arises, or feeling all potential to be there and available, the bliss of sexuality, blisses of concentration sates. Bliss can come with fear or sense of desire, etc. They are not obvious. Bliss is a very general word, it is also a very personal word. Your general usage of it I don't think does it much justice. Stop with all this "see it for yourself" crap. Just see it on your own and tell us about it, share it in that manner. It's annoying, like a cultist saying, "oh just come join us, and you will see." You mean more so that everyone should do it or those that don't are inferior. I like this way you write much better where you are present. Where you are opening up (not a lot more, but still a creak here) your experiences from a much more personal perspective then as in some universal textbook you assume enlightened experiences should be. Except the "just see for yourself" part of course. All this, all this is for you. Not for everyone. Buddhism is for you, for your awareness. It is true to you, not for everyone. You believed and as everyone around too in Buddhism and in 20 years or so have just conformed to its philosophy and transformed your consciousness accordingly. But not even the Buddha can prove to someone that his way of life is truer that that persons. The Buddha can only offer his way. He may use his spiritual powers to alter my consciousness, to show me my origins, but to decide what to accept as truth or not, or as a way of life over another is ultimately a personal matter. Remember we are just an awareness in a vast mysterious universe. Adopt some genuine humility, eh?

Then you are still living in the duality of illusion and truth. What makes your experience more real then a rabbit's? What makes your experience more real than an insects? Or someone with alzheimers? Or someone dreaming. Nothing. Your experience is not any more real than another consciousness experience. All appearances are not absolute. As in they are not undeniable. Nothing is undeniably this way or that way. You just choose to strongly believe in the undenialbility of your experience and impose it universally. Which is bigotry. And have you ever seen something that is not a mind image? Have you even understood something without thought or consciousness? What does finding a substance, a core, to the tiger or a mountain or a magic trick have anything to do with this so called "delusional" experience of them? Do you think a person takes a tiger to be real because he believes that the tiger has a substance to it? Of course, a lot of the Buddhist books point this out, of the common mind's obsession with inherent existences. But this is not true when you actually look into the mind. The tiger is real because of composite sets of beliefs have come together to form the idea of a tiger. Your memories, what you read in a book about them, including the ability to chew you up, images, not to mention instinctual survival habits of the body, that sense of fear programmed into your glands, all form the tiger. The inherency lies not in the "substance" of the tiger, but rather the degree of concreteness that surrounds the experience of a tiger. But to a tiger a tiger is nothing like the tiger of ours. Hence we can say that our perception of the tiger is not absolute but illusory, since it is derived. So you see everything is a mind image, an imagined thought. The unicorn is just as real and false as a tiger in that sense of existence. I'm not saying that the tiger is actually non-existent, or the unicorn is. But that this is the process by which our mind understands and interacts with reality. Whether that tiger truly is or that unicorn truly isn't is beyond the powers of our observation. We can only attest to what we experience and how we perceive that experience. It's not as simple as "just seen, just heard." Not everyone is Bahiya. I don't think you understand that someone can SEE something totally different. And this is just your narrow mindedness and inability to emphasize with the development of other minds due to a very boxed in upbringing in Buddhism. Then that more strongly supports my observation that you did not encounter these different practices as an "open minded" practitioner. You listed them as examples of you taking alternative paths, you know, being open minded. And I pointed out how that's bullshit considering you only "practiced" them only because they were in line with a set of pre-conceive beliefs, namely Thusness's stages. You are confusing the word "belief" with "conceptual/intellectual leaning" or "logical understanding." A person may know how all the dots line up without actually deciding to draw the shape, which is a very shallow form of belief. What you see as investigation, I can only say it is indoctrination. So don't hide under the veil or pretentiousness because it won't make people happy. It won't make people happy for a reason and that's because you are imposing on their right to his or her way to experience life. Hahahahaha! Of course the Buddha says Buddhism is the best! His the one who started teaching it! You need to understand this. And this is essentially what I am trying to convey to you: That people don't necessary, and imo shouldn't, believe that Taoism is best so practice Taoism. Or that Hinduism is the best so are hindus. They do or can do so believing that it is indeed best for themselves and/or their situation and not necessarily everyone. Choices and circumstances lead one to a particular way of experiencing life. And one way of life is no more truer than others in that both are equally existent and possible. Yours may be more blissful according to your standards, but is it more real than theirs? Absolutely not. How can you say that when they are experiencing their own ways? This is what I meant when I mentioned teaching Buddhism to a dog. If one begins to believe that a certain way of seeing life is indeed the absolute universal truth, it immediately restructures your relationship with others into hierarchies, subconsciously beginning to attempt to mold others. You don't feel like proselytizing these days? Ha! Then you might just feel like doing it again huh? Right, how can you not, when in your eyes you are truth, and others are delusion. A devoted Hindu might say the same thing right back. And that is the root of all religious conflict. You don't say "I think Buddhism is best and it will bring you to better enlightenment than all the other religions" because you are afraid of this imminent conflict. So you go about in a more sly way of persuasion. But this entire stance is to conjure up a war of values, of "mine is better than yours" when you have no idea whether it truly is or not beyond all this faith you grew up with, your personal experiences under Thusness, your conditioning. Don't you get it? Your experience is entirely to your own. Share it, but don't impose it. (It's very different when one shares with the idea that what he shares is of his own vs. someone who "shares" believing that his way is the ultimatum, the objective.) And this is utterly impossible to do unless you begin to realize that perhaps the way you experience life right now, the bliss, spontaneity, directness, freedom, is merely just another very ordinary way of living, just another illusion substituted by the mind, among a sea of diverse awarenesses perceiving life. But this would also discredit a lot of your gifts and divinity, your enlightenment, and so called awakening . Even if you are a god! or a Buddha! Not more than another speck of dust, and not anything less than the greatest stars.

Conventional truths are framed within an absolute view of the world and it needn't be clearly outlined by the conscious mind. Always. Most people take this for granted because they do not delve into the constructs of their awareness (this is where perhaps you should actually do vipassana). It may not be a perfect picture, or even logical, mostly it is unquestioned and accepted. But for any sort of conventional view or comprehension of our surroundings to make sense, the mind must have an ultimate belief in the world and its orders. Just because you don't think about it consciously, does not mean your metaphysical belief is not present. You are clearly not awakened if you do not see the relationship between the absolute and conventional beliefs and how they are really the same ocean at different depths. You can't have shallowness without depth and vice versa. So you believe that you are gifted. And also that Buddhist deities have bless your family and the birth of you and your sister. Whether you truly believe this is true or a hallucination doesn't matter because clearly you, as a devote Buddhist, accept these auspicious signs. Also it seems that you have prophetic abilities which you likely attribute to Buddhist practice. Do you still truly believe that you are an ordinary individual? I don't think so. You may not flaunt it. That would be too easy especially considering an upbringing in Buddhist ethics of humility. As you did above, you probably tell people that you are very ordinary or like to be seen that way. But I doubt you truly believe this. You believe, behind all the false humility, that you are extraordinary, special, blessed, and gifted. Nothing disappears into thin air. Not even your imagination. No energetic formation dies. A fire that burns the candle together make the smoke that dissolve into the atmosphere. It may become clouds, it may become mist. Similarly a belief cannot be destroyed. It is always transformed as a river does down a bank, taking different shapes, dissolving varying materials. It may be as dense and clogged as a rock or as abstract as thin air. But there is never a nothing. Even nothing takes its definition from the existence that came before, or the potential for existence in the vaccuum. It is erroneous, imo, to see this as a belief vs. no belief, as you seem to see it. I think you do see it in those extreme terms, as faith vs. no-faith, as you used that word in the previous post. It's rather a spectrum of seeming opposites, a degree of faith, and their seeming opposition is not absolute. Unicorns and monsters are very real in their imaginative existence. Your consciousness gives them life in a dream. You become joyous from seeing one in a dream, the sensation is there, the vision is there. It is experienced, just as the fear of the monster. And when you awake it does not disappear. The idea is very much alive within you. It can be communicated to others as well. It is indeed very real. You say you have no metaphysical positions, but here you are revealing that in your conscious interpretation of the world the dream world is less real than the daily world. I'm not saying it isn't. But do you see how you do have a certain metaphysical filter for life? That you cannot be without one? How can you have such little insight into your own mind for someone who claims to be awakened? That metaphor has another level of depth to it. The snake is still there and it has nothing to do with the rope in the first place. It is present within the mind, along with all the associations put around it: the fear of its venom, its shape, look, behavior, potential effects on your body, the slipperiness, the eyes. The snake does not come alive to the person because of the rope, but because of his mind. The rope is just a trigger that coincides with one of these associations. It's not that important whether the rope is really a snake or not. The idea is what lets you interact with it. If you had no idea of it, then the snake"ness" would be meaningless; you wouldn't recognize a snake at all. And it is still very much alive within even if someone has turned on the lights revealing a mere rope, its not gone or affected. If you contemplate deeper into this idea of a snake you come to understand what understanding is, how that snake is present within you. Then you do not tame the snake nor do you get rid of it, you comprehend your relationship to it. As a side effect that original fear may be assuaged, but that's not the point. The point of the metaphor is for you to see how you are always within the scope of your mind and its ideas, and how they are very much real and alive as anything you experience.

You are so naive. I like Informer's question. What did you break through? Illusions, suffering, craving? From what I remember your greatest attachment your entire life has been to the dharma and Thusness. What suffering did you have to break through when there wasn't much of it in the first place? What craving did you sacrifice? That statement "almost nobody wants suffering and almost everyone wants to be happy" is a completely meaningless statement when you toss it out there as an ultimatum. Wow. Nice insight there. I think it shows your lack of understanding into the basic polarities that divide a person's life. It's a complex issue, but to you it's just simple. Do what the Buddha says and that's happiness. See things in other terms then it's suffering. They are categorical terms that are widely different for an individual, the objects of preference and non-preference. Just as your peference to experience life without habitual clinging to a self is another categorical section in your experience of "happiness." Buddhism ends suffering for Buddhists or potential Buddhists. Same with clinging. Same with happiness. Buddhism doesn't make a dog happy does it. A dog treat does. This is like tossing an Eckhart Tolle book to someone newer to spirituality. Of course, consciously you tell yourself, "people are at different stages," or "he needs to experience the I AM stage." But all this in the greater context his understanding is partial to what you have progressed through, namely, anatta, emptiness, d.o. because you see these as ultimatums. So when you approach a person there will always be subconsciously that hierarchical divider in you. Or even more pompously you will give the dog his dog treat only to snicker that he is in fact an inferior existence of a dog, that eventually his "sufferings" would need to e assuaged in rebirth towards this universal goal that everyone should have to become a Buddha. It's inevitable that this is there since you believe your experience to be "truth" to other's "illusions." The way you choose to preach about spirituality just ruins the sheer diversity of the human experience. Chogyam Trungpa mentioned spiritual materialism when he came to the U.S. This is more of spiritual bigotry. The nice smile and a bit of condescension behind it. No honest engagement. Just a new hierarchy and fixed paradigm hidden behind what seems like a freeflow experience "without constructs."

According to what you wrote, antarabhava is in your mind what guided you to this birth, and gave you "fortunate" circumstances in a Buddhist family and karmic links. You believe you are an avatar of that, you do believe you are a special being, that's the definition of someone believing himself to be special: that it differentiates you from others in the form of a privilege. You might not consciously believe that to the degree of a Messiah, but there is clearly a construct within you that says these things. These are all beliefs by the way. You cannot deny, you cannot affirm. These are words that stem from belief, which you later state that you do not have any of. Your claims to ordinariness sounds just like false humility after what you wrote about your mother giving you a blessed birth, fortunate dream involving prayers, being a continuation from a bardo state, being naturally gifted with conditions for the dharma. To me your claims to ordinariness sound like a mere apologetic stance. The obvious fact here is that you are not ordinary. Anyone can see that from a 450 obsessive, paradoxically an almost self-obsessive book, written by a 21 year old who believe he is now enlightened. And you know this! You know you are not ordinary and now you pretend as if you were. Or you are totally out of touch with what ordinariness is, or yourself. Direct insight to you. Keep that in mind. It was within your awareness that you had a direct transformation. Deconstruction is another form of construction. Those words mean only what they do in relation to one another. But ultimately both are movements of the mind, its transformations. Constructiveness can seem dense and deconstruction less so, but both are transitions. What do you wake up to when you awake from unicorns? Horses? And what makes you believe horses are any realer than unicorns? "ALL metaphysical constructs, and beliefs, and positions"? Don't bullshit yourself. Everything you wrote above is bound in those. Being free from all metaphysical constructs and beliefs and positions is just another position. It might seem like you no longer experience held beliefs, or certain cyclical habits such as your mind returning to the notion of a "self," but that's just a habit now thrown away. Beliefs condition experience, give rise to new habits. You have just chosen to experience life more spontaneously and freely. It doesn't make it any more true or false than a man living with a "self." Please don't quote these things. Speak from your own mind and not borrowed words. We are not speaking about Buddhism. We are speaking about you because I think it's far more interesting to delve into who you are than these doctrines. Can't you differentiate Buddhism from yourself anymore? You don't understand the foremost things about illusion. Illusion does not negate something's existence. If a billion people believed in unicorns and dreamed of them, how can you say there are no unicorns with any certainty? If a person was under the fear of a monster in his dream and that fear was experienced, what is to say that monster is any less real than a tiger you might run into in real life? You are very close minded. Of course, close mindedness is a taboo in our age. Your second paragraph here basically says "I am very open minded, but you cannot change my mind from what I've seen"!! That's the very definition of close mindedness, the unwillingness to change. All along you were just making yourself climb Thusness's ladder. Your interest in Advaita mirrors his interest in advaita. All the vocabulary and methods of thinking you use are based on those stages. Remember when you first introduced ruthless truth? You didn't like that site because oh it "resonated with you" but because you wanted to deepen your convictions in anatta, which happened to be the next stage in the Thusness ladder. Don't bullshit yourself. These teachings didn't draw you within their own context, but only because they were in line with your intellectual and personal commitment to Thusness' teachings. They seem "true" to you because they agreed with you already believed in. You were never opened to the idea of an alternative beyond that. Your entire spiritual journey is just this one directional effort to become, confirm, and experience the ideas of Thusness. You should just give them link to Thusness and tell that that's what you followed. Of course the Buddha's teachings "resonate" with you next. It's what's on the next step. I know it sounds bad to say "I think buddhism is the best and better than all the other religions out there. It will lead you furthest in terms of human potential" but you should say that since it's what you believe, instead of a half assed disclaimer before it, "oh I think all religions are great" with an asterick next to it saying, "but Buddhism is best." Yes, remind yourself that is your your own consciousness' paradigm. And it still is and always will be.

No shit. Ken Wilbur and Andrew Cohen thrive off of the hierarchy model. They are the self professed western Gurus of our time demanding devotion from students for financial and egocentric gains. Are you not aware of criticism often directed at them for manipulation of students and abuse of their status as infallible teachers? I disagree with their little jack off session here. Spirituality has no set hierarchies. It is the right of the individual to choose his path, to choose how his or her mind interacts with the world and affects it. And their mind's biases will lead them to that end. IMO, not everyone wants to be a Buddha. Has that ever crossed your mind? If someone offers them enlightenment, freedom from the ego, they might just as well say no. I want to watch tv instead! Some people like having their egos, they like their Jesus, or they prefer to experience life through an all pervasive creator. What exactly is the higher or the lower human potential when people want different ends, different experiences? Bliss and pleasure mean different things for people. Some people like pain more than pleasure. And people always change too. The Buddha is not inherently better than someone who is watching tv and scratching his balls. It's only a matter of personal mind construct. In the universe, they are just two living beings. Acknowledging the inherent freedom of life and respecting that in each individual is necessary for peaceful coexistence. No inner "snickering" at someone else, oh because they don't feel the bliss that you do! We can always offer alternative ways of life, how we can each choose to live in a certain way as to truly respect someone else's conscious interpretations. To me no conscious mind can be omniscient of that which it cannot perceive. It can understand itself, how it views things, and why it sees things in that way, and transform, but ultimate omniscience is logically impossible. We share and participate in life that is very mysterious. You cannot prove that which is beyond your consciousness. It's logically untenable. You can only do best for yourself and offer others your own ways. That's it. Life is a mystery you cannot solve. If you solved all of it, that would be the most tragic event.

On the contrary you haven't said much and everything here in this post is fairly new. Only now you are beginning to reveal yourself, and imo not only on here, but to yourself as well. Take a more introspective look at what you wrote below. So your faith is based on nothing more than the influence of your upbringing and your family (christians, muslims, hindus profess their own "glimpses" of faith just as you might have had with Buddhism). Not only that, you believe your birth to be divinely inspired, and "choosing" your birth hints that you think you are already a high level practitioner or even a Bodhisattva. You were ordained at 2, and since 14 trusted your view of reality to a man named Thusness. Your mother told you stories of how divine your birth was in the Buddhist context, and hey, why question it when antarabhava is supposedly your guide? Replace all this with any other religion or belief system and we just have another indoctrinated child. Have you looked into believers of other religions who, as strongly as you do, believe very dearly in the truth of their upbringing and faith? And see that they are true, as silly as seeing the face of Jesus on a damn toaster? Ah but to you it isn't belief, it's an issue of direct insight, which is more frightening because your awareness of life has shifted to a different way of experiencing. Your logic that supports your way of experiencing is still largely based on faith, and using logic, we can construct a completely different way of experiencing life, whether with a "self" or "Self" or as Jesus or mind/body/spirit. People much more intelligent than you or me have done so. The mind can transform itself in multitudes of ways, and just because you tend to experience it in the way you believe is the right way or the blissful way, it does not make it the truth. I think you are in a deep hole. I wish you could throw away all Buddhism related ideas and start from a blank slate and see where you end up. I don't think you've ever considered an alternative way, an alternative truth, your entire life. Which is honestly frightening. There are many ways of attaining freedom, peace, aliveness, bliss, wonder, etc. all the things you enlisted in "fruition" are all not that impressive. Do not think that your way is the only way to have arrived at these joys. Energy practice, different religious devotions or other forms of belief systems can get you there. But i don't think you would know this. This is what's missing from you, is that empathy of other's mind and its workiings out of context from Buddhism. You cannot see things outside of that paradigm, and of course not. How can you when you've been repeatedly, and literally repeatedly, been under its influence since you are fourteen, right when our cognitive understanding of the world is truly evolving? That is the age of doubt, rebellion, questioning. But instead you comfortably adopted the ideas thrown at you without questions. It makes a lot of sense that for a long time when you posted here you just plastered bits of quotes here and there to support yourself. You own logic behind your beliefs, as I have seen in discussion between you, GIH, Vaj, tco, me, dwai have been very lacking. At the end of the day all you could really say was, "the Buddha says it here" followed by, "and I see it that way too." Never have I once seen you engage in a discussion in a socratic manner of delving into questions solely within the question's context. It's unfortunately always tied to Buddhism for you. The summit is not Buddhahood. Eckhart Tolle is doing what Eckhart Tolle is doing. He is not trying to become a Buddha like you. So get that out of your head that we are all trying to become Buddhas. Maybe he is not even trying to reach this "summit of spirituality." You see how you just drag everyone into your categories and views? I will reply more on this post and the quote you posed below.

Because his path is not intellectual. It's not academic. I'm not looking for drama. I'm looking for context. Every individual has their own context for understanding, as in HOW they have managed to arrive at an understanding, their view. And since Xabir's stuff is the same as Thusness' there is no personal context to any of it. It's just, "I did what Thusness said would be the right thing to do. And now I'm am like him." I'll reply more in detail later on. But Xabir is a fantastic character study because he is so oblivious of himself through all this. He can't describe his relationship to spirituality besides the word "interest." How amazing is that for someone who write a repetitive, an almost obsessive, treatsie that essentially copies his teacher's? I'm not questioning Xabir's realization or how enlightened or clear minded he is. It's there are a lot of missing holes to his story that I would like to fill in, if possible, together with him.

Do pop cultural "primates" make you feel superior? What's wrong with Oprah? Dumb it down? Have you read through the journal next to Thusness' stuff? It's a mess of a copy. If you like rigorous analysis go to the philosophy section in the bookstore. There's plenty of rigorous analysis there. It's not lacking, you should maybe not look at Kadashians for that analytical stuff.

No, everything you write in the book can be traced back to Thusness' stages and the other two articles on anatta and realization. Your fruition is merely, "oh it feels good" and adds nothing. The effortless vs. effort aspect is all over Thusness's stuff. You simply have nothing to add, and imo just create all the unnecessary clutter to what is already written. It surely doesn't seem like it. Or you are way out of touch in regards to what successful communication is. 450 pages of repetitive and self serving essay doesn't appear to be written for the so-called other seekers. Reading through doesn't give me the sense that it is written for that purpose, there is no reaching out to the reader, there is just self congratulatory bullshit language weeding through the same road Thusness outlines. Why is that too bad? Because you value it and hold it in esteem? To people who are not interested in spirituality I do not say to them "too bad, you don't get to experience the things I do." Not at all. Spirituality is and should be a very personal matter, but your approach is not like that at all. It is universally enforcing, as in, "my way is the truth, and yours is not. I know the true bliss, whereas you do not." This is imposing. This is just apologetic crap. You say "it is not meant for everyone" with an idea in the back of your mind that your way is actually the true method, that it goes beyond "oh the inferior I AM stages of Tolle." I see, then it's not a journal or inquiry into who am I. It's an instructional guide to enlightenment based on Thusness's teachings. It's as pompous as Ingram's conceited Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, in which he approaches things very similarly as you do. He categorizes all of Buddhism into how he sees it without any experience in the sects and methods he criticizes. He believes his destination is final, shoving things into his "cycle" mode just as you do into the 7 stages. "Hardcore." And what, everything else is "softcore"? See the value you are adding to your own path above others? BUddhaghosa and Namgyal's texts are in a different time period and written to instruct their students, to leave a guideline for their respective lineages. They're like official documents to a school. Also Visudhimagga, at least parts of it, is also disputed to have been written after Buddhaghosa. You are not in that position. And Zen is very personal. Zen is not a set of a, b, c instructions, but a struggle between the master and his student to achieve a heart mind connection of understanding. Shouldn't you know that from your relationship with Thusness? It has nothing to do with your writing skills. It has to do with its missing heart. Funny, the first noble truth is that life is unsatisfactory, it is suffering. But suffering is not the right word as its connoted in our common usage of it, it's no pain, but pain may be a part of it to some. You are not Ramana Maharshi. Your spiritual experiences were not spontaneous. They were fed to you by Thusness. Also, I'm not talking about intense suffering. It doesn't have to be suffering. That is a very difficult word, what "suffering" is. It can take many forms, but I guess you can say it's something that compels one to transition, the urge to transform one's current life into a different mode of being. How can you propose to say you have any spiritual insight when you do not understand firsthand what suffering is? What the anxiety that lies under most human beings has its roots in? You dismiss it as "whatever." It doesn't have to be intense crisis or suffering, your obliviousness to it reveals how out of touch you are with basic humanity that underlies all this spiritual exercise. It has some life transforming effect you saw in books so you went ahead and did it? Why then you might just be a some crazy voodoo cultist worshipping flying monsters by now if Thusness had been someone different! One does not simply decide to transform one's life out of passing interest. There must be something that propels him/her out of their current states of existence. If just mere interest leads a person to a religion or a way of life, that person is very ungrounded and is a mere victim. Again, it doesn't have to be a wreck, a depression. The very fact that you are seeing it in terms of "oh if it's not a roller coaster, it's not worth sharing" reveals a lot about your take on how to communicate spiritual experiences and ideas with others. You seem simply out of touch with your own humanity. Why don't you talk about the faith "crisis"? Respect for teachers? You can always make their names up. That's such a phony excuse. You have always been so reluctant to be vulnerable, to be open. Write about all this bliss you are feeling. Where do you feel it, how does it transpire? Ramana Maharshi didn't write a 450 page e-book. I find it hilarious you have tried to rely on Maharshi as a comparable example to yourself. Your version of how you present yourself is mostly very strange. Who writes a 450 page book out of just interest? Debate for 30+ pages for ideas that, well he is just interested in? Dedicate an entire blog to a man's teachings...well, just because it's an interest? This is not the same type of interest one may develop in playing the piano, it's more like an active decision to devote oneself to an environmental cause, or a dedicated religious devotee. They have reasons behind their passion. And your path has not been spontaneous. Thusness coddled you through 5-6 years under his doctrine due to your intense attachment to him and his methods. Your story of yourself is unconvincing.

No, everything you write in the book can be traced back to Thusness' stages and the other two articles on anatta and realization. Your fruition is merely, "oh it feels good" and adds nothing. The effortless vs. effort aspect is all over Thusness's stuff. You simply have nothing to add, and imo just create all the unnecessary clutter to what is already written. Why is that too bad? Because you value it and hold it in esteem? To people who are not interested in spirituality I do not say to them "too bad, you don't get to experience the things I do." Not at all. Spirituality is and should be a very personal matter, and your approach is not like that at all. It is universally enforcing, as in, "my way is the truth, and yours is not. I know the true bliss, whereas you do not." This is imposing. This is just apologetic crap. You say "it is not meant for everyone" with an idea in the back of your mind that your way is actually the true method, that it goes beyond "oh the inferior I AM stages of Tolle." I see, then it's not a journal or inquiry into who am I. It's an instructional guide to enlightenment based on Thusness's teachings. It's as pompous as Ingram's conceited Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, in which he approaches things very similarly as you do. He categorizes all of Buddhism into how he sees it without any experience in the sects and methods he criticizes. He believes his destination is final, shoving things into his "cycle" mode just as you do into the 7 stages. "Hardcore." And what, everything else is "softcore"? See the value you are adding to your own path above others? BUddhaghosa and Namgyal's texts are in a different time period and written to instruct their students, to leave a guideline for their respective lineages. They're like official documents to a school. Also Visudhimagga, at least parts of it, is also disputed to have been written after Buddhaghosa. You are not in that position. And Zen is very personal. Zen is not a set of a, b, c instructions, but a struggle between the master and his student to achieve a heart mind connection of understanding. Shouldn't you know that from your relationship with Thusness? It has nothing to do with your writing skills. It has to do with its missing heart. Funny, the first noble truth is that life is unsatisfactory, it is suffering. But suffering is not the right word as its connoted in our usual usage of it, like as in pain. Pain may be a part of it. You are not Ramana Maharshi. Your spiritual experiences were not spontaneous. They were fed to you by Thusness. Also, I'm not talking about intense suffering. It doesn't have to be suffering. That is a very difficult word, what "suffering" is. It can take many forms, but I guess you can say it's something that compels one to transition, the urge to transform one's current life into a different mode of being. How can you propose to say you have any spiritual insight when you do not understand firsthand what suffering is? What the anxiety that lies under most human beings has its roots in? You dismiss it as "whatever." It doesn't have to be intense crisis or suffering, your obliviousness to it reveals how out of touch you are with basic humanity that underlies all this spiritual exercise. It has some life transforming effect you saw in books so you went ahead and did it? Why then you might just be a some crazy voodoo cultist worshipping flying monsters by now if Thusness has been someone different! One does not simply decide to transform one's life out of passing interest. There must be something that propels him/her out of their current states of existence. If just mere interest leads a person to a religion or a way of life, that person is very ungrounded and is a mere victim. Again, it doesn't have to be a wreck, a depression. The very fact that you are seeing it in terms of "oh if it's not a roller coaster, it's not worth sharing" reveals a lot about your take on how to communicate spiritual experiences and ideas with others. I do not believe that's what dukkha is. You seem simply out of touch with your own humanity. Why don't you talk about the faith "crisis"? Respect for teachers? You can always make their names up. That's such a phony excuse. You have always been so reluctant to be vulnerable. Ramana Maharshi didn't write a 450 page e-book. I find it hilarious you have tried to rely on Maharshi as a comparable example to yourself.

In all seriousness you should go and burn (or in this case, erase) your e-book. Forget about all this for a year and type it out again. You have so much unnecessary language piled up in the database. And why would you torture someone into reading all this repetitive and wordy essay? Just let them read Thusness 7 stages. It's much more direct and clear. In my opinion, all this is written for yourself and thusness, to show that you went through what you did. Maybe there's some deep need within you to prove that you have done so, to say "yes, I get it now. I get what Thusness has been telling me all these years." Consider practicing insight practices into yourself and not reality. Who exactly is this book written for? And what is the origin of that urge? I mean, where are the chronicles of personal struggles on the path to enlightenment? This is what's blatantly missing from all of your writings. They are incredibly impersonal, and that's why Seth thinks you are a robot. In all these writings about what you went through there is not one iota of personal detail. Consider the time I asked you why you were into spirituality and enlightenment. And your answer was some textbook bullshit about "I want to save all sentient beings and become an omniscient Buddha." That's not an answer. No one is born with that idea, the Buddha wasn't born with that motivation. Spiritual motivation is a byproduct of suffering, and suffering is something that is rooted deeply within by attachments, desires, longings, i.e. very personal stuff. And all this is such an impersonal presentation of something that is supposed to be profoundly intimate. To quote someone else, 95% of the Path is dealing with these blockages and it's not easy. The I AM or Anatta stuff is very minor compared to unhashing your own subconscious. It's very irnoic that you title your "journal" "who am I?" and even by the 20th page we don't know why you went on this journey, your hopes, fears, attachments, vanities, loves, sacrifices, pitfalls, etc. as in...the things that make us human. The blatant absence says more about you than hundreds of analytical differences you draw between I Am, anatta, or whatever. Edit: I do recall one detail you mentioned in a discussion once. About how at one time you were in awe of spiritual masters, but upon approaching Thusness' methods they seemed no longer that special.

It doesn't belong to anyone, in the sense of possessiveness. But you can't deny that your path belonged to a set of instructions and ideologies you've chosen to adapt your consciousness to.

Not really. If I interpret Brahman as Everything. As in everything there is, the concept of independence, or permanence are all pretty mute. Independence is an idea on the opposite of dependence, as is permanence opposite of impermanence. We can only see motion in comparison to stillness, same with substantial and insubstantial. So if we understand God as all, that all is awareness, those conceptual definitions don't apply. But I don't think you can understand this type of approach at all because your mind has tied all these language patterns to "oh no no, clinging 101." Faith is not something you have or don't have. It comes in degrees. Also, intellectually anything can make sense. You're just bullshitting yourself. Your faith in Thusness was irrational. You had an affinity for his teachings, the man himself, and the methods. They are not wrong, that's not what I'm trying to point out. I'm trying to point to you your false sense of how you've come to these realizations. Your memory seems to be very hazy. Don't pretend like you approached this whole thing with an open mind. Clearly you didn't. It was very much an single pointed effort towards Thusness stage 7 from the very beginning. Yup. They were posted in context of "A" and "B." Not in the context of which they were written. Do you think Ken Wilbur was thinking "oh hey, what I write is Stage 3 of Thusness's teaching!" Likely not. That man, as well as all these different practitioners came to the knowledge they had through their own context and experience. You very much disregard that by shoving it all into some A, B, C program. It's good in small doses. But seems like you chugged the Kool aid.

Yup. And that achievement belongs to that religion as a result. You submitted to it, you practiced it, and attained what it said will attain. But don't tell that other guy in some other religion how his/her experience is inferior, or only just one aspect of your own.

No doofus. He's been writing like that for 4 and more years even before he has any of those cool realizations. The way you write with so much self glory is really unbearable. Who mentioned anything about conservatism? It's just unnecessary topic here man.

You speak too much of irrelevant topics to the discussion, as in this thread and in others. Why don't you go clear your head a bit, your bible thumping isn't that impressive.

Substantialist Brahman, or non-substantialist brahman. Call Brahman non-substantial, as many mystics have, like the Tao. Dependent origination leads you to the view that you are arising of causes and conditions. Brahman as totality that occurs through causes and conditions, One Law. They all say the same thing. But besides the point...oh my god. This post is almost all bullshit. You do argue about the superiority of Buddhism over Advaita. It's what you've been doing here for the past four years, that Advaita only takes you to a certain state. 2008 we debated pages and pages on nondualism, inherency, no-self before you had any true firsthand experience in Thusness's states. That came to me as a shock later on. You debated so strongly for a set of teachings purely out of faith.Not once in those debates have you shown your leanings towards advaita, besides respect towards certain mystics. You were convinced in Thusness even before the experience, why else devote an entire site to his methods otherwise? Hahahahah! AF teachings? The only reason AF teachings attracted you is because they were closely in line with Thusness's. It wasn't an alternative, it was basically, "hey! here is something that agrees with what I believe!" Of course not. Even before you saw it, you wanted it. You need to go practice vipassana and look into not what you are seeing but how you've come to see them. You have a serious problem.

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This is far different experience than the theoretical "clinging of practitioners" you rambled about. Your experience of these states are all backed by previously learned states and convictions in which you had great faith in, namely Thusness's methods. It's pretty clear your investigations are not really investigation rooted in personal efforts but just following in the voice of Thusness. Hence imo you lack empathy into other practitioners stages and that's why you have such difficulty connecting to spiritual seekers on this forum. Your doubts were never really doubts, just a little passing phase to get to that next Thusness stage. As GIH once mentioned, you are a mere voice hearer. I like these kinds of posts a lot better than whatever you usually put out here. Speak about personal experience. You spoke about bliss. Why don't you describe that a little further? How do you experience it? What is it like? As in show it. For someone who is so open to the transience of life, you sure depend a lot of second hand analytical language. Any third person reading through these posts can see that Seth is very much more open than you are. You just seem all in the head.