Nikolai1

It is e attitude behind the meditation that is so important. We can't judge meditation as a simple activity without taking this into account. A person may meditate 24/7 for years, and if the do so with the aim of enlightenment than they will achieve nothing and their meditation is likely a block. Another person, who realises that each moment is beautiful and perfect and is able to therefore live with love and impartial wisdom, may never need to sit at all. But their whole life is already the essence of meditation. If you view meditation as a good technique, without also seeing that it is also quite useless, then you are holding a most unfortunate view. Nearly everyone enters this trap for a while, and those drawn to Buddhism and zen may stay in the trap for decades.

Nungali My theory, quite new, is that we mature into our archetypal existence. The lives of the unregenerate are not written in the stars. The counsel of the oracles is the gift reserved for those brave enough to become individuals. This is why Tarot is derided as meaningless by most people. Because it is for them.

Hi dreambliss, Yes I'm sure, but what happens the moment you stop playing? You go back to a low frequency, and that feels bad and so you start playing again. Any pleasure that is 'out there' in the world is like this...it lasts for a certain while and then ends. And so we become addicted to them. You are right that the spiritual quest should be fun, but I think you misunderstand the nature of this 'fun'. The fun comes from within, it is a feeling of peace and confidence that burns within you wherever, you, whatever you're doing. Life starts to fel like we are just moving from one fun thing to the next, and then we think, 'hang on, I've just found myself looking forward to cleaning the toilet!!!' Chasing pleasures always comes with a downside, because pleasures don't last - inner fun lasts forever and transforms everything. You've suggested yourself that 'shutting yourself in your room with your games console', while fine at the time because it made life bearable, has left you with a problem. You're happier now, you don't need the 'fun' of computer games, but you want bigger and better things. But you feel unprepared to go get it all because you spent so long playing games. Fully agree, but how was life when you weren't playing computer games? Dull, I bet? Alan Watts was born in 1915 so he could have stayed alive til the 90s. But he died young, at 58, because of his life-long alcoholism and perhaps the sadness of his four broken marriages and many scattered children. A life of misunderstanding the word fun is my guess!

Hi Bindi - of course what you are saying is the usual materialist explanation for dementia: the brain changes and so consciousness changes. But for those who have understood the emptiness of their true nature, both the brain and the consciousness become mirrors of each other. It makes no sense to try and set up causal links between them. Such a person is fully conscious of why senility might occur. They understand that it is their sense of being ego that plaques over, but not their essential self. And because they understand, they know that there is more to selfhood than ego, and their lived reality is therefoe able to pass through the senility into a new and even greater lucidity. What I'm explaining is a radically new way of looking at dementia and only really comprehendable to those with the higher experiences of self hood. It is a possibility only available to the few.

What are the benefits of them? How do they further the seeker along the spiritual path?

My guess is that your ideas about how to leave aren't very realistic. The Dao does not support abstract fantasies generated by our own minds. But the Dao will keep prodding you to work a way out. It really seems like you aren't going to let yourself settle at home for another decade. Something has to give. You still seem very opposed to finding work and finding a flat of your own? Is this true? You are drawn to spiritual communities because there will be a structure there, and duties to perform, but you'll be surrounded by more like-minded people rather than alone. I think this is all fair enough. But do you understand how one approaches a community and joins it? Do you need to arrive with money to contribute? Do you need to have some kind of demonstrable skills, or can anyone just muck in? For some communities (like Findhorn), I'm guessing, you have to go through all the motions of taster weeks, voluntary retreats etc - all of which cost serious money. You have to show your commitment to the ethos before you'll be accepted as a more permanent community member. In the UK we have websites like this: http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/ have you looked at the US equivalent? I'm sure there are people here who could answer these questions.

The two camps in this thread are: 1) That the forgetfulness is a basically pathological state. That something has been misunderstood and you've been led down a false path. Or that there is some energetic blockage that you have noticed and now must deal with. Or that, morally, you have allowed yourself to get side-tracked by emptiness to the detriment of your everyday life. 2) That the forgetfulness is a natural, even necessary consequence of the awakening process. Just as it is impossible to go from summer to winter without autumn in between; it is impossible to move from egoic to awakened consciousness without a period of adjustment. The forgetfulness is annoying, but tolerated because of all the wonderful changes that are also happening. I must admit, it hadn't occurred to me to think of the forgetfulness in the first sense and I've been quite surprised by the moral objections that have come up. Forgetfulness, for me, eludes moral judgement. You can't deliberately forget something that you fully recognise is important. Your forgetfulness is because you have entered a state of being where the former concerns quite literally don't exist. In the quote from the OP, Spotless said: In the Seth Material there is a chapter about how the dementia or senility we see in the elderly is actually due to the same reasons as awakening. These people are spontaneously entering an enlarged state of being and have left their former egoic concerns very suddenly and very completely behind. In our society we think about dementia as nothing other than neural degradation. We do not suppose that the neural changes are simply mirroring a cataclysmic spiritual shift. We pathologise the process; we try to fight it with cognitive enhancing medication; but what we do not do is recognise the benefit of the process. The elderly person interprets the early signs as something wrong and fearful, we all cling on to their times of lucidity and nobody is able to trust the process and welcome it. If we had the wisdom to welcome the process we would suffer less from it. Senility first arises in a gentle way in most people in their fifties. This is when the fear surrounding it subtly begins. If at this point we could welcome it, I would suggest that dementia as a phase could be entered, dealt with, and left behind within a decade. What would follow would be an old age of a lucidity that the young would envy. It is a well-known fact that dementia rates vary hugely across nations. The Japanese in particular are protected from it. It is often thought that the high Omega-3 diet is playing a role. I would suggest that Emptiness is a concept intrinsic to the Japanese psyche, and so when emptiness strikes it is not pathologised to the same degree. Some food for thought!

Perhaps only noobs think that formal sitting meditation is the only way to enlightenment. I think all spiritual practices are just variations of meditation. I also think that meditation becomes constant for the enlightened person. I also think that meditation isn't the way to enlightenment, it IS enlightenment.

I don't know why but sheepswool bedding gives you a beautiful night's sleep. Expensive but we swear by it.

Spiritual growth occurs on many levels: on the inner level we discover higher and better ways feeling love, joy and peace. On the outer level we learn to be more uniquely and authentically ourselves. Through the pursuit of our own bliss, we learn what our unique individual role is in the infinite scheme. Before spiritual growth occurs our roles are not individuated. We do whatever we have learnt to do from those around us. We conform to the practices appropriate to our situation in time and space. To transcend our time-bound situation is spiritual growth, and it is painful. Depression is one common form of spiritual pain. We feel depression when there emerges a discordance between our aspirant spiritual self, and our conformist time-space bound self. We find it increasingly difficult to go along with what we have always been happy to do. Our hobbies, interests, motivations become irrelevant to us, but we have not yet developed the confidence to see them as outdated…and lower than we now want to be. Our former ways were conformist. They therefore received the approval of all those around us. When we start to give up our former occupations we visibly reject what everyone around us consider to be the chief goods of life. We suffer criticism, and we are expecting to change. We double our sufferings by agreeing with our critics, because we do not yet have any explanation for our behaviour. We have lost our will to conform. And as our whole being was as a conformist, we also lose our identity, self-respect and the respect of those around us. One day our will to act, to enjoy, mysteriously returns. We say to ourselves “I just decided to pull myself together”…but this was no individual decision. Your return was prompted by the activity of a different kind of will. This will, the will behind our own will, is what the spiritually growing person discovers. Depression is no illness, however unpleasant it may feel. Just as fever is the body heat-blasting the microbes, depression is a curative process. And just as the onset of the fever is the start of recovery, depression is actually the attempt to heal a former state of pathology. To the conformist in time and space, depression is the pathology. It is the loss of all that is important to the mortally minded individual. We must have the confidence to see things the other way round. In this as in all things, seeing things from the opposite perspective is the skill of the spiritually adept. It is the unique ability to see things through the eyes of our higher spiritual selves. The first depression is the worst. They will continue to strike, but with the passing of each one we become stronger and more confident in our ability to cope. Eventually, in the midst of the darkness a small voice is able to remind us: “This is good for me” And we will feel grateful for the opportunity.

What you are saying, CT, is absolutely right. I'm not talking about myself as a perfected, awake person. Maybe you would prefer I used different terminology? I'm talking about the time when peace and love are a daily reality, but there is not the high level of skill which can feel the peace and at the same time heed the voice telling us to stay bang on top of our lives. On balance, though, I am absolutely definitely a more benevolent force in my family and in life in general.People most certainly are supported by my awakening, most of all my wife and kids. I think to forget appointments is a trivial omission when compared to what I bring. Nothing is a bad situation any more. I don't avoid anything. Just being with my kids, just being with them, is perfectly wonderful. I don't notice the toilet needs cleaning, but if it does, I do it and I don't mind. None of this "I cleaned it last time, its your turn nonsense." I just clean it. And if my wife feels its her turn, then I let her clean it---no problem. Hope and love and confidence, that's what I have. Inner peace is the basis of ethics. The inner bubble bath means you never need to strive for others for a place in the bubble bath. You just need a bit of time to get used to the peace. You need to learn a new skill.

It was unfortunate, that's for sure. But it was one event in a life where I am having to make deliberate effort to remember things that once came naturally. But don't worry I am not drifting off into space, life never lets you anyway. Just saying that awakening brings the need for re-learning. A process of sorting the wheat from the chaff, which until now you've never done because you've always had convention to follow.

I'm sorry CT but this is a ridiculous and vulgar statement. Sitting on the park bench is not time lost. Its like saying that learning to ride a bike is time lost that could have been spent just riding it.

As you've probably realised from my interest, in the last 1-2 years this has become quite a big challenge in my life. A concrete example from 2 weeks ago. My wife had an email from our son's teacher to please arrange an end of school year chat. As I was collecting him that afternoon, and I would be having the chat, she passed the email to me. Miraculously I did remember to arrange it, I agreed a time the following afternoon: in less than 24 hours time. Then there was not even the remotest further cognition relating to this until 4pm the next day, 2 hours after the appointment, when my wife asked me how the conversation went. The look of surprise on my face showed that the conversation hadn't happened. I was shocked by the appointments total absence from my consciousness, but something interesting did happen. I remember having a very, very, very faint cognition about 15 minutes before the appointment to check my diary. No reason was given, but I was required to check my diary. I didn't do it, because the voice to too faint to take notice of, but there was something very faint there. Anyway, I have a few explanations for this phenomenon in general: 1) For me the main reason is about motivation. A huge amount of what happens in the everyday world is unimportant to me now. Most human activity is based on desire or fear. I have hardly any desire or fear for the things that other people desire or fear. Their agenda is no longer my agenda. I'm like Spotless at the traffic lights. I say to my wife: I carry a bubble bath and a glass of champagne wherever I go. Any time I want, I can just slide right in. So, some things I am disengaging from because I don't need them any more. This level of functioning won't ever return. I don't fret about earning money in order to buy real life bubble baths. 2) Inability to hear the quiet voice of intuition. To the pre-awakened the voice of intuition is very loud and booming, but narrow and conventional: it is deaf to new, creative possibilities. To awaken is to lose the booming voice of convention and enter silence. But it takes a while to tune your ears both to the calls of the necessary conventional and to the creative. Awakening seems to temporarily silence everything, and that is inconvenient - I left that poor teacher waiting for me! 3) So these two taken together means that some of the functioning will return as your hearing returns, but a lot will not because old motivations do not return again. To think that we'll just get over it and go back to normal is wishful thinking. We wlll forever remain too useless to perform a lot of the duties that the world considers important. Sad but true!

Please tell more!!

Hi Michael, Time to give you thanks and feedback for the reading you did for my wife; Whatever my wife does, she does well - it is hard to imagine a more conscientious person. It seems like whatever direction circumstances had taken her, she would have made the best of where she was. A couple of downsides are: she doesn't possess what could be called genius. She gets where she gets through hard work, will power, and the ability to learn from others, rather than through unique inspiration. My wife is Finnish but her command of the English language in far superior to most English. Her ability to mimic the nuances of English is unlike anybody I've ever met. She wasn't a child when she came to English, she was 18, but still nobody ever realises that she is a foreigner. She is also a proficient science writer and has published many papers in respected journals. But, as with before, she has learned well the required style of academic journals but it is not in any way unique. It is highly generic, and I think she would struggle to write anything more singular and creative. Well, this isn't the case because she is a hopeless liar and seems lost when she hasn't got reality to rely on. She can be very manipulative, but I'm not sure if this is the same thing? She's a person who could go into politics because she often can't distinguish between the truth and her opinion of the truth. Her first instinct is to get people to see her view, and gets frustrated by the need to form a shared view. She isn't someone who can generate higher truth perspectives, but is rather more interested in using her truth as a means to achieve results. A pragmatist, basically. Yes, my wife's will is her true power centre. But, and maybe this is a shadow trait, but she is not a creative person. The direction of her will is usually provided by external mentors, whose work she then very diligently implements. Maybe it would be an individuation project to listen more to her unique self? So, onto the wheel of fortune: Our 11 years together have seen near constant change. For example, we have lived in 7 different towns and 9 different houses! Probably the contemplation, although she isn't the contemplative type. But yes, the past year has been about reevaluating her career, which is part of the reason we are going back to the UK. Another really interesting exercise, thank you. I think we both learned a lot from this!

Dreambliss' blog is amazing, I read it a lot. Latest story about the birds fleeing the nest is simple but moving.

Spotless - why does it become hard to work for a while?

Hi Michael It came as a revelation to me when I realised that a symbol, like any word, is not only referring to something beyond itself, but is also an event in reality in its own right. In other words, when we view a symbol as a mere symbol of something more real, we lessen it. Any symbol is fully real, fully alive. I think this is the basic crux of Jung's whole work. Maybe this realisation is what is needed for the results of Divination to be a meaningful and living reality . For me, I've spent most my adult life uninterested in these matters but experiences with the I Ching changed that - its now pretty much unfailingly helpful. Some people seem to born knowing this. Because I've always been very intellectual by nature, it was very important for me to view symbols as pale reflections of a much more real reality. I was very slow. Life is so much more beautiful, rich and interesting without this limited belief.

Its like all those mythologies that have these formidable Custodians at the Gates of Heaven. In our society, I see psychologists and psychiatrists as these custodians. These are the ones whose job it is to try and 'send us back below'. They will tell us that our greatest strengths are illnesses; our greatest insights, illusions. But the strong don't listen!

Hi spotless if I wasn't here on this website, but talking to people in everyday life I would probably be recommending psychologists left right and centre. But I think there are a lot of people here who have moved beyond that worldview, and especially our OP here. Its no accident that psychologists so often get vilified here, by this group. Another good example which I forgot to mention is OCD. People with OCD think that their thoughts have the power to shape reality, and the burden creates immense anxiety. This central belief is called 'magical thinking' by the professionals and is considered the kind of keystone to the whole problem: the thing to be modified by cognitive therapy. How would DB's belief in Law of Attraction be interpreted? As mental illness!

Yes but why not?

Hi bojole Looking into another's eyes is always extremely uncomfortable when our consciousness is directed inside upon ourselves and our own mental life. Another persons gaze can feel unbearably intrusive when we have already opened ourselves up to ourselves. Everybody has times when they experience this. If we are consciously aware of things that we wish to conceal then another persons gaze must be shut out. If we are being dishonest, eye-contact is hard, if we trying to hide anything it is also hard. If a person, for some reason, makes us feel inferior and we wish to appear otherwise then eye-contact is very hard. It is more than likely that you are making more of this than is necessary. There are probably many times when you are making normal eye-contact but it completely escapes your awareness because you are not, in that moment, being self conscious. If other people comment on it with you, then you can assume it is something you do more than others, but even then its not a big deal. About your emotions, you make it sound like this is a long-standing thing with you and not just an apathetic phase. Some people aren't very emotional because they are living according to principles that don't require outside intervention (e-motion=moved from the outside). People who take a logical, rule-based approach nearly always know in advance what comes next because they have made sure to orchestrate their circumstances as such. There is nothing wrong with this, its a perfectly legitimate approach. They simply live without the need for sudden inspiration. If you are starting to feel frustrated by this, or feeling that life might be richer if you were more enthusiastic about it, then it may be a sign that you are going through a personal shift in perspective. Often we start getting frustrated with something about ourselves when it has already started to decline! And during times of shift you may notice emotions making an appearance with an insistence that they haven't in the past. At first, you will naturally revert back to default mode. This gets called repression, but there is no volition involved. With time you will allow then more time and attention and eventually start acting on them. I think Miffymog gave some good advice on techniques, and the dangers of expecting too much too soon. to become less self-conscious is to become more confident. Confidence literally means living with faith. It means letting your words and your behaviours simply issue forth without a fussy self-monitoring of their content. Confidence is beautiful, charming and charismatic and is the opposite of being boring. Hope this helps!

Thanks Michael This is what interests me the most. Is our archetype within us but somehow obscured by our more conditioned everyday selfhood? I think so. I think the highly conditioned person is an arbitrary amalgamation of all the thoughts, opinions, behaviours of the time and place they have grown up in. Their archetypal nature is hidden by the noise of all the people that are influencing them. Individuation is the process of stripping all this away, and allowing a deeper essential selfhood reveal itself. It was always there, but its influence was weak. With individuation we become conscious of our archetypal nature, and it is this that allows us to see and recognise the meaning behind things like the Tarot. If we don't do this for ourselves, then it will require a very skilful and intuitive Tarot Reader to discern the hidden truths. But our archetypal selves are not our deepest selves. The archetypal self, in my case the Hermit, is more like a spiritual law or pattern that we notice we are following. In some ways it is a replacement for everyday conformity to society. We notice that our body in time and space is conforming to an ancient pattern known only to the seers. Obviously this applies very much to the I Ching, which has constantly intrigued me how it can give such relevant responses. But who we actually, and deeply are, is the witness that notices our other self and the lawfulness of his behaviour. To discover our archetypal nature is to discover a meaningful dimension to our existence that before we quite literally did not see. I have found this whole conversation deeply rewarding, and lots of things have become clear that I have wondered about. Thank you to everyone participating. Michael - my wife is away but I'll discuss it with her and give you some feedback

Michael - I've been thinking more about this 8 and 11 issue. I've noticed that when people call the card Lust they talk about in a certain way (enthusiasm, passion etc9. When they talk about the same card with the same picture but call it Strength it seems to be all about fortitude over our inner self, demons etc. Two quite different narratives! I still don't resonate with the passion bit, but the stregnth bit I do a lot...and the picture of the lion being tamed is of particular resonance because lions often appear to me in dreams as a feared object.