Lucky7Strikes

I do not want to reify my experience, but also do not want to discount them. The quality of it was much different than any trance states, certainty of presence, or contemplation. (Haha! I remember I would sit and all these ideas would just pop up in my head about texts like the secrets of the golden flower or tantric practices and I drew these diagrams for my roommate and started reading people's personalities. I also tested my body by drinking, which I normally cannot do since my body does not take it well, to see if I could consciously detoxify it). It felt very much like it was the way reality was supposed to be experienced. I posted a thread on the bums when this was happening and people thought I was going nuts. Anyways, those experiences and recent contemplation on awareness and mind, have really changed my perspectives on your path, just to let you know.

I was but for family reasons I had to stop. . But I didn't become a vegetarian for that period because of some ideology. I just didn't want to eat meat for a while.

I didn't feel unconditional love. I felt unconditional compassion for anyone I met and immediately knew what to say and what not to. I could barely face certain people who were open energetically because my heart would send my entire body into uncontrollable bliss. I would stop speaking in mid sentence because my heart was literally paralyzing my body (ok I'm remembering this lunch I had with a friend and I just began crying out of joy and she got really scared :lol: ). I could barely meditate during that period of about ten days because I would pass out in spontaneous prayers. It didn't reference anything. The deeper and deeper I went, the more awake I became, I didn't know I could be that awake, and that awakefulness was coupled with an incredible sense of creativity and love. It wasn't a trance state because my body was breathing and responding to everything differently.

Haha! Xabir, look what you've done to thuscomeone! Made him a worse mirage! :D

Whoever wrote that excerpt has only a conceptual view on compassion. The last section of non-referencing compassion seems to be a limited understanding, but nonetheless is an accurate view of the realizations we enter as we progress. Compassion and being become inseparable. I am not sure whether this is incorporated into you and Thusness's models because I do not see Thusness talk about this as direct experience but only conceptually.

No this is not the experience I was looking for. This is not pure compassion/love. When the heart begins to open the flow of love inherent in awareness becomes inseparable. You feel more and more awake. More awake than you could have possibly imagined you could be. The very though of sleep disappears, and one realizes that to be aware is to be compassionate. That compassion is our very being. It's different from bliss states. I was awake for almost a week. My brain began to literally melt as the sutures lined up. I had no sense of movement or locality. In those stages there was no recollection of "I" or other. Everything felt connected and whole, and as if the polarities of existence, day and night, began to merge together. I could feel the joy and the pains of those around me, as if they were in me. For some reason your path, although I've practiced accordingly, does not line up with mine. Insights and experiences revealed to me during practice took different directions. I did not feel ungraspability, but creativity.

@ Xabir, Hey, um mister mirage...uh, ok to see what dependently originate out of you now, I want to ask. Do you feel genuine love and compassion. Did that experience arise in your, um, d.o. machine? NOt intellectually or conceptually. Do you feel a sense of love radiating out? Be honest. Well, I don't know if you can, because you don't have a will. But hopefully something honest dependently originates.

I'm sorry, I no longer feel it necessary to engage in a conversation with someone who believes he is a mirage.

Have fun living as a moment to moment mirage. Just rolling along! Governed by causes!

Huh? Is that mindstream continuous or is it also disjointed moments?

Ok..governed by those causalities. The arising of that particular sound is determined by the combination of those conditions. I don't see how this changes anything. Let me just summarize this again: Everything dependently originates due to causes and conditions. So understanding that things are empty and nothing is graspable, experience becomes just arising and ceasing moment to moment. Sense of will or individual control or doing is an illusion.

Sounds good, the simultaneity of finite in the infinite, and finite potentially also infinite. I agree with this, but perhaps a little differently than you do.

Ok: you are an impersonal process of the universe. But the way you feel that is not "out there," but intimate. As spontaneous arising. If we only have present memory, why do you remember yesterday? Or the day before. Or more than two moments?

No, drum beats are determined by, according to you: the drum, its size, materials, the person, the person's mood, the air, the occasion, etc.

Ah OK! So you agree with this too. Will is determined. Can we just agree on this that you and Xabir do not believe in free will, but determined will?

If there is nothing linking existence, why do we have selfhood? As in how do I distinguish a "me" ness at all if it's just disjointed moment to moment? Why do we feel flow of moments? Why do I have knowledge of past and present if it's just disjointed moment after moment?? Moreover, how does one see two disjointed moment A and B and compare them at all?

Ok, ok. Just EMPTY appearance rolling along. That changes nothing.

That's redundant don't you think. That's like saying process depends on process. Causes and conditions are not things in the manner in which we have been using that term, they are ways things work. So it makes no sense to says causes and conditions depend on causes and conditions, you are basically saying everything arises from causes and conditions.

Causes and conditions depend on emptiness? I thought causes and conditions render everything empty, so no "things." Anyways, can you give me an example of this?

You "personally"? An individual? What and where exactly is this individual personality apart from causes and conditions...? Or are you saying there is personal line of causes and conditions? Because I think I can agree with that.

No, that's just causes and conditions. You said causes and conditions depend on something and is hence empty. What do causes and conditions depend on?

It doesn't have to be "out there" or "in here" when you experience, nor do you need to feel being controlled or not being controlled. Let's not be concerned about feeling, but with the technical view you have of your experience and existence. You also don't need to feel its "set in stones." Many people feel differently about their lives and the way they experience things that often contradicts their overall views of reality. You ask a material scientist if he believes in a soul. And he will say no, but a lot of his actions can arise as if he believes in some independent spirit beyond just neuorns firing off in the brain according to hormones or whatever. As in, the consequences of their world view does not dictate the way they live. Your underlying view of experience, no matter how intimate or close, is that causality governs your existence. As you wrote to thuscomeone again about Maha, universe is just flowing through as Xabir's experience. I just want to make this clear.

Can you give me an example of how causes and conditions depend on causes and conditions?

Are you saying, when A and B and C get together, of which C is a state of consciousness, just "poof!" another state of consciousness arises? Does that mean in your view consciousness is discontinuous and moment to moment arising? That would make life a disjointed experience. You would have multiple awarenesses, not to mention the lines drawn between these moment to moment awareness experience seems completely arbitrary.