goldisheavy

I agree with you 100%. It's been very similar with me too. As I have surmounted fear, anxiety, shame and guilt I realized that 90% of my drive to live was gone. But for me, my life was never completely driven by negative emotions. I've done many things purely for the joy of it. For example, I learned how to program computers on my own, just purely having fun watching something come of my labors, as if by magic. I really enjoyed that. I also loved lucid dreaming, contemplating, meditating and engaging in my spiritual path. I've met some pretty cool people as well. While I consider the world to be filled with mostly idiots, I was lucky to meed some rare non-idiots. So for me life was never a complete drudge or a slog. There was joy and magic in my life too. But once 90% of my drive was gone, I definitely found myself sort of floating instead of rushing forward like a man on fire. But from my point of view, there is no point in killing myself now. I will die in due time. What's the hurry? I am not in any hurry, that's for sure. I don't fear adverse conditions. Approval of other people hardly matters to me. There is really no reason for me to run from this life into the next. Death will come on its own and I fear nothing this life can throw at me. I don't fear life. So? I am certainly patient. I can wait 3 long aeons if necessary. I don't have some kind of heavenly appointment I need to rush for. I view future lives as dreams. I've had countless dreams and I know one thing. Generally all my dreams are good. Some are amazing and much superior to my day to day life. Some are slightly more boring and stupider than my day to day life. There are many mundane dreams which are identical to what I experience day to day. My dreams become magical and enchanted if I intend them to be, but then, the same thing works for day to day life (although it is much much impressive and scarier in day to day life than in a dream). In other words, my life is as enchanted as I can take it and as I want it. I don't know if you can believe me, but from my point of view, everything I say about me is true for you too. You have the same abilities. The purpose of life is not something that can be given to you. Even if someone tells you what your purpose is, you can always reject it or accept it. So you are still the final authority on your life's purpose. You can make your life's purpose arbitrarily amazing and meaningful. All you have to do is think of the best thing you can, kneel down and make a vow to dedicate yourself to that purpose in your own mind. I have such purpose for myself. I've dedicated myself to the utmost wisdom and to the perfection of knowledge. I have some other, more minor vows. Nobody forced these on me. I took them upon myself of my own choice. You can do similarly. Don't sell yourself short. You're not a mere consumer of life. Life is not like a TV show. If you don't like a TV show, you flip the channel. In this life you are a movie director. If you don't like the show, you write a new script, hire new actors, and enact a new show. You're not just a show watcher (this is a consumerist approach to life, where life is thought to be thrown at you by the powers that be and your job is to merely passively consume it as is). You're a director. You have the power to direct.

You're right. Most people live their lives the way they do out of fear, guilt and shame. If these three emotions didn't exist, the world would be a hugely, hugely different place. So it's no surprise when you hit a tough point in your life, all everyone has to give is fear, guilt and shame for the most part. This is because these other people live lives of fear guilt and shame themselves. They share what they got. How else can it be? You can't share something you don't have. Imagine this, a great many people feel like you. You are not alone. But people pretend and keep up appearances like crazy. They try to blend in. They know if they look unhappy at work, their chances to get fired go up. Etc... To be honest is to be fearless. But people are fearful creatures and thus they are hardly ever honest and being full of shit is the natural human condition, because of fear. Someone who has nothing to fear has no reason to lie. As for the suicide, I recommend the following approach. You can kill yourself in your mind. Imagine you are already dead. You've been reborn. As a dead man living you now have no fear. You can even legally change your name to signify this momentous occasion if you want. It's up to you. You're a new being now. You have nothing to worry about and nothing to fear. All your anxieties have been cleared away. All your fears have been cleared away. You can work with other people, but you don't have to take shit from them anymore. If someone annoys you, just respond in an honest manner and let the chips fall where they may. You may be surprised, but you may be OK living that way. Why? Because first of all, people secretly love an honest person. Why? Because people wish they could be fearless and honest themselves, so when they see someone else being fearless and honest, it gives them hope and courage. People want to be around a fearless and honest person. Of course not everyone loves a fearless and honest person, but enough people do so that the outcome of an honest and fearless life is not one of obvious and a clear doom. You should dare life to throw whatever it has at you because you are bigger than life. You are a dead man living. As for a positive reason to live, I find these to be positive: Reach perfection in your craft. If you're a plumber, become the best plumber you can be, if you're an electrician, become the master of your art and improve the state of the art, etc. Reach people and help them think. Train your mind and body (all the training will be carried over into your next life, so nothing is wasted). Learn to heal yourself (healing abilities carry over). Learn to live without fear. Learn to live out of love of life, not life as you or people imagine it, but love of life as it is and can be at any and all times. Take frequent walks in nature and contemplate as well as enjoy. Meditate to keep calm. This is your opportunity to jump to a higher level of life.

In a sense to run behind something in secret you need an oppressive something to run behind. However, if being a mystic just means living the experience of spiritual union and wisdom, then of course it would be possible without the big organized religion. Not only would it be possible, but it would be easier to breathe without the organized religion. It all depends on your goals in life. If your goal is to sneak around in secret, then it helps to have a good legitimate reason for that sneaking around, such as the climate of persecution. If your goal is to nurture wisdom and to open yourself to new and strange experiences then you don't need an organization that's bent on persecution. EDIT: Oh, I think part of your question is: do the mystics need religious vocabulary to lean on? My answer is no, they do not. Mystics can "mystify" any language, and the social structure of organized religion is not necessary to produce spiritually useful terms and meanings. I would even go further. I would say that if you don't have your own vocabulary you're not a real mystic to begin with. It's important to have a shared vocabulary to talk to others, but it's also important to have your own vocabulary to talk to yourself in the terms that are most relevant to you. A mystic who appears on Earth is someone who has one foot in convention and one foot beyond convention.

K, your satire detector is broken. Satire. Dig it? My post was of course complete nonsense. On purpose. That's the point. You can take any experience and break it into an arbitrary number of levels or densities, whatever. It can be helpful to do so under two conditions: 1. It's very temporary. 2. It helps you see something interesting. That's it. Once you see an interesting aspect, you should forget about the levels because they don't exist in reality. I'll give you an example of this. This Earth can be split up by the longitude and latitude meridians. To think of the Earth in terms of the meridians is completely misleading and false. But once in a while you need to arrive at a certain specific point. If and when that is the case, you can use the knowledge of longitude and latitude to arrive there. As soon as you arrive you forget about the meridians because they've served their purpose. There is no point in talking about them or thinking about them. As soon as you forget them, they stop existing for you, and that's a good thing. In my life I find no use and no meaning in levels of any kind. Enlightenment has no levels. Wisdom has no levels even though some people are wiser than the others. Experience has no levels even though some experiences are more profound than others. Nothing has levels. Nothing has order. It's all open and free. And people who talk about levels are just there to be made fun of. And talking about densities is of course just another way to talk about levels. Zap me with a crystal. At least the idea of meridians is useful sometimes. The idea of spiritual levels is never useful and is always a block and a limitation in one's mind. Instead of opening to what is here and now one is busy counting levels and anticipating the future higher levels. Wrong way to go. Just open to what's happening now. That's the only level that exists that you need to pay attention to. All other levels are imagination and imagination is only beneficial when you are its master and not its slave. Be the master of your imagination. Don't be a slave to your imagination.

E = mc*c, but on the 16th density you get M = c*e*e. When you spin up your divided light it becomes whole and then it cancels itself out. What's left is the undivided light. When M = c*c that is the 43rd density and this can only mean one thing. It means you're in a narrow neighborhood and need some directions. At that point the light folds into a pentagram and you'll notice how the GDP of your home country takes a plunge due to an energetic bind. That's the precursor to enlightenment. Any questions?

Well said, but it's more than just "staleness." Organized religion is more or less on a war path against human nature. They deny sexual instinct. They demonize it. They perpetuate all kinds of myths and superstitions about sex, including the so-called "Daoists" who claim that ejaculating means losing energy and so on. It's very unhealthy. This is where a lot of the misery comes from. It's dogma + dittoheads + crazy and misguided ideas. If there was one dogmatic person that no one cared about, that person would be relatively harmless. But if this dogmatic person is surrounded by 100,000 dittoheads who all go, "Yes, yes, yes, whatever you say we all believe every word all the time no matter what, yes, yes, yes." Then you have a dittohead army of 100k people, brainwashed and ready for deployment at your merest word. This is the situation that becomes dangerous. Now infuse dogma with false and harmful ideas, combine with dittoheads, and boom, you have huge social problems all over the place, up to and including violence. Violence against people of other religions and violence against people of your own religion (to keep them in line). Verbal violence and physical. Etc. Nasty stuff.

Apech, I hope you are joking. Of course they'd be able to do it. I would argue that it's precisely the dogmatic and dittohead-ish nature of organized religion that kept many mystics at arm's length in many parts of the world. Traditional religious orthodoxies and bureaucracies were very hostile to the mystics and at best tolerated them. Didn't Meister Eckhart get excommunicated? I think Eckhart got lucky he wasn't burned at the stake. What would happen to a mystic who says "I am the Truth" in an Islamic country? Just ask al-Hallaj. Screw everything about organized religion. I have put all the biggest organized religions on a demolition track and I am not bringing them back from the dead. Not all religions are as oppressive as Christianity and Islam, but I think we all know that the process itself is dangerous and not just the content. Content does make a big difference, but the process of organized religion is a dangerous and unhelpful one. I think people do need spirituality, which is to say, people need wisdom and teachings that go beyond the apparently physical existence. But there should be a way to make these teachings accessible to everyone without the strangulation of organized religion.

Yea, I have much fewer problems with a conception of God being immanent (I think that's what you meant instead of "imminent"). It's much less manipulative. Then everyone knows they have equal access to God and there is much less potential for someone to claim an exclusive access and then say, "Since I have exclusive access to God, everyone of you better start to follow myGod's instructions, or else!!"

I agree that if someone claims to be a representative of a theistic God, the potential for abuse is greater than in the Buddhist environment where people are considered wise or even enlightened, but then, anyone can be wise or enlightened, so it's not an exclusive and all-powerful thing like with God. For me that's one of the top reasons I reject God as well. The top reason is that God with an independent will and being is illogical (unless God is a being among beings, but then God is not a theistic God anymore, but merely someone like Mars/Jupiter or a Deva in Hinduism). Still, even in Buddhism, especially when it comes to the cliquish secret clubs, the potential for abuse is there. And it's a good thing to be educated.

It's going to be: 1. He said, she said. 2. He says, "It was consensual." Now, try to prove otherwise. If the rape is a violent kind and the woman takes pictures and collects evidence, there is a good chance to prove it in court. If it's not a violent kind, then good luck trying to prove it. No bruises? No dating drugs in the bloodstream? You're reporting it 5 years after it happened? Good luck with that. Thing is, the allegations can be completely true, but the chances of them standing up in court are almost zero.

So I think the woman was correct after all. Samayas are secret or otherwise not well known, so how is she supposed to know about that? And her observation about the general Tibetan culture is correct I believe. Even if she knows about samaya, it is still a reasonable thing to believe that the culture is weightier than the samaya. Your culture was put there by generations of people, friends and family, and from a Buddhist POV it's fixed firmly by countless past lives. Samaya is a relatively arbitrary decision on your part that is not as stable and as weighty as the basic culture. Samaya is more superficial than the basic cultural assumptions. That's why it takes vigilance and willpower to keep samaya, because it's not normal. Of course the lama thought that. The lama thinks that he's a ray of sunshine and that if he deigns to shag some woman, it's unquestionably a blessing. I agree. That's how it works in theory. In practice what happens is that there is a famous lama and you've only heard good things about the lama (saying bad things about the lama breaks samaya). The lama says you're special, which is exactly what you wanted to hear all along. One thing leads to another, and by the time you realize what happened the deed is done, as they say. Authority is a powerful drug. To deny that would be senseless and a denial of our own nature, as you'd probably agree.

I have two questions: 1. When exactly in the interview does she say something to the contrary? I will watch the interview at the precise minute and second to try to understand what you're talking about. 2. Are you making a distinction between the ideal case and what actually happens in real life (theory vs practice)? Are we discussing how things ought to happen or how they actually tend to happen?

Shut up and take my money!!! Just kidding.

I doubt I've read 6 sentences. It was more like 2-3. You weren't responding. You were just typing. There is a difference. There is no reason to avoid responding either. No reason to engage and no reason to avoid engaging. That's the attitude I have. I don't waste my time. If I am responding it means I know what I am doing. I either have some profound purpose in mind or I am just getting some momentary entertainment, but certainly I never waste my time.

Vmarco, You're one hell of an incoherent babbling human being. Words seem to have no meaning for you. You just throw them around randomly, the more the better. When I ask you questions that should be small one paragraph answers, if indeed they can be answered, you launch into endless streams of babble. You've got nothing. When I told you "good luck" I didn't mean I was going to leave you alone. I meant, good luck dealing with my questions in the future. I'll let you babble for a bit, but expect me to be back with more questions.

So the light spectrum is complete and yet divided at the same time. What makes it complete? What makes it divided?

I agree 100%. Not much else to add. EDIT: I lied. I have something to add. What you described is the best case scenario of aware death. There is also a possibility of the person passing out into amnesia/unconsciousness out of fear and waking up being 5 years old in some other life, having missed everything in between. It's like an alzeimer's patient who is dead while alive in a way, although for alzeimers I think the cause is not necessarily fear (it could be one of the possible causes), but apathy toward life and hence absentmindedness, or alternatively an overriding sense of tiredness which takes over (like a person who wants to sleep so badly that staying awake becomes a nominal process without truly being alert and present, due to inwardly wanting to relax already). As for amnesia, we have heard of many people failing to remember traumatic near-death events, so amnesia happening at death would not be anything extraordinary or unusual.

Religion is born of ignorance. If everyone was enlightened there would be no religion, no preachers and no one to preach to. Furthermore, no one would be scared of anything. People would be fearless, and thus a major avenue of control used by organized religion, fear mongering, would be out of question.

Orb, When I read your link, I found the show mentioned in the article. Here's a link to one of the clips from the show. I think the woman in the clip is right about a lot of things and people should pay attention to what she says. I'm going to watch other clips. The clips can be activated on the lower portion of the page, under the main video clip window. EDIT: Here's an interview with Stephen Batchelor on the same topic. I found this interview to be very insightful.

Death is not a complement to life as I see it. It's a complement to birth. If you see yourself as dead in each moment you have to see yourself as being born in each moment too. That's the complement. Birth and death are symmetrical concepts. Life is what makes this whole process possible to begin with. Without life, no birth, no death. Yea, if you relax even for a moment, you'll instantly become the same as everyone else. I know what you mean. I think that's a sane approach. I do my best to follow the same principle.

I think the process of organized religion is a corrupt process. Unlike steve f who thinks it's all just individuals, I think since the process itself is a corrupt one, the individuals are only at fault for engaging in the process of organized religion and not for anything else. That said, various religious doctrines are not all equally good and equally peaceful. Some religions have aggressive doctrines that take a stance ranging between animosity and condescending indifference toward outsiders. You can imagine the effect these doctrines have. As for why the organized religion as a process is corrupt, it has something to do with what I like to call "dittohead power." There are people who don't like to think for themselves. These people are just waiting to be told what to think. Then someone arises who agrees to fill up the minds of the dittoheads with various programming. When that's done, dittoheads become organized into an army. I call those dittohead armies or dittohead power projection. And organized religion is essentially a dittohead power projection phenomenon as a process. Dogma is at the center of practically every organized religion and practically every organized religion's priests go around telling dittoheads what and how to think, and when, and how many times a day, as well as whom to fuck, how often, when, and so on. And when needed these dittoheads can be mobilized as personal little armies for the benefit of the preacher. When dittoheads are not used as armies they are used as batteries, as a financial base for the preacher. It's a sick and dysfunctional process if you ask me. It's not the case that it's just a few bad apple individuals caught in a generally good process. No. The whole process of organized religion is a dysfunctional one from top to bottom.

There are strong logical inferences that point to the fact that you existed before you were born. If you're willing to accept those, then it makes sense to accept the complementary inference. Information/meaning is only valid within some context and not inherently so. When you were born and the first bit of meaning appeared to your being, how did you make sense of it? That's easy. You had context from which to make sense of most things you were about to experience. A specific example of something you didn't learn upon birth is this. You never had to learn what it means for a being to look at you. You knew that at birth. Who taught you? Well, the Buddhist explanation is that it's a mental habit built up from your past lives. So if you can accept that, then accepting life after death is trivial. Death is complementary to birth. Life must be there for birth to occur and life must be there for death to occur. Birth is evidence of life. Death is evidence of life. You are always alive. Your view is a typical physicalist view. Also, I think the fact that you're not buying into anything without understanding it for yourself is great. If you're not convinced by what I am saying, there is no point in buying what I am saying.

A person is enlightened depending on the total context of that person's mind. The total context includes outer, inner, and secret levels. The outer level is what the person observes outside one's own person. The inner level is what the person observes inside one's own person that can still be communicated to others if desired. The secret level is what the person observes both outside and inside one's own person that cannot be communicated to anyone, even if desired. Because of this, when we observe other people, we observe something incomplete. This assumes you treat the idea of other people seriously. We cannot observe any other person's secret level of being. One of the meanings of this is that we don't fully know the truest and most total meaning of the person's actions and expressions (actions are expressions and expressions are also actions). If you don't take the idea of other people seriously, then people appear as mere artifacts of one's own lively shimmering awareness. As such, these artifacts cannot be said to be enlightened or unenlightened, because they are partial and transitory. So whether you take the idea of other people seriously or not, you cannot know if someone is enlightened or not. Ever. The best you can do is guess or make an assumption. Nonetheless, we all need to make choices. We have to choose which people to associate with and which ones to shun. Which people are we going to take more seriously and which ones are we going to take less seriously? If enlightenment cannot be the criterion that can be used for this purpose, then what can be? Is there any way to make judgements about people that is not pretentious or deluded? I say yes there is. That way is to observe how various people affect your understanding of things, how they affect your life, and how they affect your ability to realize your highest aspirations. In other words, you judge other people by judging their effect on you. At no point do you ever need to know if someone is enlightened or not. If someone has a beneficial effect on you, and that someone is in truth ignorant, that's great. If someone is actually enlightened but has a deleterious effect on you, that's terrible. Because it's impossible to know whether or not the person is enlightened, it's also impossible to know how close the person is to enlightenment. If you don't know where the New York City is, it makes no sense to talk about how close someone is to the New York City. The only thing we know is the content of our own personal experience. That's the only knowledge that has even just a chance to be valid and reliable. Everything else is pure speculation. So saying something like "Steve f/ralis/goldisheavy/SereneBlue/-K-/any taobum, you are not enlightened" is completely pretentious. Maybe he or she is enlightened. Maybe not. I can't know and it doesn't matter to me. I tend to take other people seriously, so from my point of view, the state of other people's spiritual attainment is ultimately secret. It's a kind of secret I am not even interested in knowing. There is a Zen koan about an abbot of the monastery using an ignorant idiot as a role model for meditation and Zen. The idiot would sit and sleep in the sitting posture for hours on end, and all the monks thought how amazing the attainment was and so they tried to outdo the idiot in their sitting. Then when the monks held debates, the idiot would make nonsensical statements without any understanding of Zen, and all the monks thought it was a very profound truth worth contemplating, and as a result deepened their own understanding. This way the village idiot became the teacher while the abbot found some time to relax. There is another tale from the Vajrayana tradition. It goes something like this. Grandmother asked her grandson to bring Buddha's tooth as a relic worthy of veneration. Grandson was going away on a journey. This grandson instead spent too much time having fun, learned some things worth learning, and was returning home having completely forgotten about the tooth. Then he remembered he promised to bring his grandma Buddha's tooth. As he remembered this, he noticed a dead dog on the side of the road. So he took one of the dog's teeth and brought this tooth to his grandma. After a while he began to feel guilty for having tricked his grandmother in this way. So he came to his grandmother to confess that it was only some dog's tooth. When he came in, he noticed the tooth was levitating in the air surrounded by rainbows. He told his grandmother that it was only a dog's tooth and the grandma replied that it didn't matter. In her mind it was Buddha's tooth and it did the work of the Buddha's tooth. There is another story about a sage who couldn't pronounce the mantra correctly and someone came over to teach the right pronunciation... I bet some of you know that story. Anyway, the point is the same. What matters is how things affect you. It doesn't matter what those things are or are not.

Just like other concepts.