Nikolai1

3bob - teachings of self and no-self are only apparently 180 degrees apart. It is not necessary to keep one and let go of the other. In fact, it is a powerful practice to at least attempt to understand how they might both mean the same thing. As Jetsun says, it is always helpful to hold any teaching quite lightly, and Buddha gives us permission to do this by insisting that all teachings are but rafts to cross the river, to be abandoned at the right time.

Hi Maldor, In my post I talked about how the understanding of the true nature of energy can only come as a fruit of spiritual practice. The essential breakthrough is when we personally experience pure awareness, which is awareness totally unmediated by thought. After this moment it becomes very clear that thoughts are just passing events within awareness, and are not awareness itself. This gives us a new perspective on reality. Things that we thought were real, like energy, are actually just thought forms. Energy is simply a thought word. This word is entire in itself, and does not refer to anything. Reality itself is unthinkable. A thought cannot symbolise it, as any given thought is itself it. With this secure vision we no longer need to conceptualise reality. We no longer need to say things like energy has material reality.. It is abundantly clear to us that nothing has material reality. Then we notice that energy itself can never be seen, but is rather an inference drawn from the behaviour of other nameless things.that can't themselves be seen. In your thread describing your mystical experience you said: 'Within the experience everything was ... a word that does not exist in the human vocabulary.' It is interesting that you perhaps think it could be described, but no-one has yet coined the terms. With further insight you will see that language, which is intrinsically representative, can never - and this is necessarily so - can never describe your special experience, or indeed any experience. It is the core assumption of language that there is a difference between the word and what the word represents. This difference is the illusion that we overcome. In that same thread I told you that you must go through several years of confusion if you are to integrate that experience into your practical understanding. Conversations like this are part of that process. Firstly, we see that time only appears in the form of thought. Thought only appears now. So the present and the past/future become experientially indistinguishable. This leads us to take linear time less seriously, which sets the stage for the second insight: There is an ingredient that is present in each passing moment, without fail, and we start to take it seriously. It is awareness itself. As we focus more and more on this ubiquitous ingredient, our perception of constant flux reduces. This is because we are fixated on that which doesn't change - the ingredient common to each moment. Time simply ebbs away from our experience because time is dependent on the notion of change. When there is no change for us, there is no time for us. I should say though that this is a gradual process for nearly everyone. The feeling of existing in time can return, its just that we feel that we are living more and more out of time. Sudden events can suddenly shift us into the eternal, but unless there is a stable intellectual scepticism of time alongside a felt affinity with pure awareness, these sudden events will simply fade away...with time. Best wishes to you

Yes go for it. I've been working on this yoga for ten years so always good to discuss it!

Actually, there is a serious point in all this. I often say I practice three yogas: meditation, philosophy and my wife. An intimate relationship can be an incredibly accurate mirror of our own blind spots, failings, weaknesses. If the relationship is one of co-dependency: i.e. one where your strengths correspond to her weaknesses and vice versa then it is likely, at times, to be highly conflictual because you are both obviously unlike. Learning to take your partners example, and become more like them and at the same time continue to be true to yourself is extremely difficult and challenging. It is both difficult, and it requires us to reassess everything that we thought made sense about our approach to living. This person makes us grow into a more rounded person. Actually, some relationships run out of steam when the creative tension of co-dependency is removed by one party becoming whole. That doesn't matter, the relationship was still a powerful agent of your own growth.

Darling, I've realised that learning to rise above you will make me a better person...

Marrying the wrong woman is truly the Yoga of Yogas.

BTW Yasjua, please don't think I'm criticizing you. I know how difficult people like your flatmate can be: the things about them which cause most trouble to people, they think are their greatest virtues. But, I can only talk to you, and I think there's much you can do to help here from your side.

She doesn't sound the 'shrooms, shamans and astral flight type

Hi everyone, Love, it is true, is always felt as a matter of the heart, but at the same time, we always understand as well why we love a person. Even if it something very, very basic like 'my male body loves her female body', our mind is fundamentally in on the act. Our love has its reasons. We are always aware of what we are getting from a person, and that is why we love them. Well, my mind came to the painful conclusion that I am completely whole as I am. Nobody can offer me anything that I don't already have. I am no longer pursuing the kinds of aims that other people can help me with. My life's purpose is my spiritual realisation, and I now see very clearly and obviously that I have come as far as I can by the aid of others. The rest is up to me, or God. What more do I want from mere people, with their vulgar opinions, their trivial aims and childish behaviours? This dark view is what I held, and I now realise that it was the cause of the loneliness of my Dark Night. People did not abandon me; rather I abandoned them. The rational purpose for my love withdrew, and I was left cynical, without a need for anyone. I think many go through the same process. And yet we truly suffer for the lack of love that we feel. Our inability to love is the cause of our loneliness and our suffering. To step out of the Dark Night requires taking a step that is so breathtakingly radical that we can hardly believe it is expected of us. It is something so big, and we have no choice but to take it. We must love people anyway! Even though it still remains that we no longer need anything from them, we shall suffer unless we learn that we have everything to give them. Not giving love will leave us without love. And even if we are hated in return, the love we give will be taken and received by ourselves. Love is pure paradox: selfish love and selfless love are the same. The moment we start to get selective about who we love is the exact same moment we start to suffer. To be selective is to imagine that you need something from a person. To imagine you need something is to realise you don't need anything. To realise you don't need anything is pure loneliness and alienation. Our true need is to give love, moment by moment by moment. How do we do this? I've realised that in the centre of my chest there is a constant warm feeling that never goes away. I have no idea if I have literally kindled this warm glow through practise, or whether everyone can feel if it is pointed out. But when we concentrate our attention on this nice feeling, it so dominates our being that we cannot help but radiate the same warmth outwards. So we are not intentionally setting out to love people (that would be a bit creepy), but rather intentionally setting out to feel the love in ourselves and then allowing it to passively spread outwards. When we focus on this feeling in the chest, it completely obscures thoughts. it is like we, as individuals, have stopped being a thought-based entity (in time and space) and have become a love based entity. In otherwise love itself becomes our identity rather than our ego. Only when we are egos does separation exist, as separation is the product of thought which is the key feature of the ego. When we love there is no thought and so no separation. It becomes impossible to determine which way the love is flowing. All you know is that, here, in this moment, there is love. Love is its own reward! Even though in every given moment there is an object of your love, it is impossible to give any particular reason for loving this object. Or, you could say that, it is lovable because it is present reality itself, and that is reason enough. Thanks for reading! It would be great if any of you could elaborate on some of this stuff. It's all quite a new direction for me in recent weeks and very exciting! Nikolai

Hi Marblehead, Unconditional love at its lowest levels begins with thoughts of compassion. Compassionate thoughts are the proof that we have transcended our own strict selfhood. Those entirely bound by the self don't have compassionate thoughts. You did. At middle levels of unconditional love the thoughts are united by the will which results in behaviour. So our thoughts have entered his skin, and so have our behaviours. The cigarettes are withdrawn from ourselves and given to this other self who smokes them on our behalf. This is unconditional love actualised. At the highest levels the heart gets involved and separation has entirely broken down. What started as solicitude for another is now total oneness. When twoness disappears, then the amazing feeling that we all call love breaks through and we start calling it unconditional love proper as a felt reality. What you did at the gas pump was unconditional love, but you don't recognise it because the deep felt component was missing or at most very subtle. Why did you not reach the heights of unconditional love? Because you don't believe in it. You don't believe in it because you are not inspired to further cultivate it at any of the three levels. You're stuck. On a discussion forum the aspect that most often comes across is intellectual deficit. Your potential for compassionate thinking is compromised by your stubborn attachment to bad philosophy. This is my opinion of you. Were I to meet you in real life, I would see better whether the intellectual aspect is your weak link in an otherwise rich and loving existence, or whether your intellect is weakened by a cold immunity to the beauty of the world and isolation from other people. Anyway, I don't want to criticise you because you seem one hell of lot wiser and nicer than anyone I meet in real life. Do you come across better than you are? Do you find it harder to be patient and amiable in real life than on the internet?

My guess is that before you both met you were probably very different people. She: basically insecure and empty and well in the habit of gaining social approval by pleasing others. You: Independent, autonomous, and basically using your own individuality as a way of eliciting the individuality from others because that is what you want most from other people: their authentic selves. Then you both met and it was a collision course. You were both the nut that the other couldn't crack. All your strategies were failing. You would not allow yourself to be needed by her; she would not be her own person in her own right. Well we can't speak for her, but you have a lesson to learn from this. Some people are, in the their truest nature, airy, insubstantial and conventional. You have to come to terms with her, even though she goes against everything that is most important for you. If you were as boundaried and responsible as you think you are you actually wouldn't be fazed by her. You would see that she needs you to see her clean your shoes. Let her clean your shoes and she can move on, her point has been made. But you won't let her because you aren't yet independent and boundaried enough to let others be unboundaried. Your need for independence is a need and therefore a failure of your own integrity. When we are still in the process of honing ourselves into who we wish to be, we tend to try to get others to be the same as us. This us because we turn our own individuation needs into universal virtues. It is hugely confusing to see the importance of self-reliance and at the same time encourage others to be dependent on others. Hugely confusing. So you need your roommate to be more self-reliant, while she is needing you to be reliant on her! So no advice, but a description of the scenario and hopefully some food for thought.

Hi Maldor, You are right that time and energy belong in the same category, so let's talk about energy. Energy is not something we can ever directly perceive. We infer its existence through the behaviour of reality. For example, if the logs have turned to ashes, and the pan of water is now boiling - we infer that energy has transferred from the wood to the water. The energy itself we never see. It is purely a product of our imagination. Energy is therefore an intellectual device that we use to explain the changes in reality and is entirely rational in nature. Like all things that are purely rational, there is no reason why we couldn't substitute 'energy' for another purely rational term. For example, we can just as legitimately say that 'love' or 'hatred' passed from the wood to the water, or even 'holy spirit'. When a phenomenon is unseen, there is no limit to the number of labels that can be used to name it. This causes us extreme consternation when we see others explaining reality through logically opposite terms and is the setting for nearly all academic fights, as well as the squabbles between those who use scientific terms for reality and those who use theological terms. Time, by the way, is exactly the same as energy. It is not something that can be seen: it is a category of understanding reality - purely rational in nature. It can cause us immense confusion when we notice that time is the same as eternity. Both can be legitmately used because we only talk about time in the Now, which itself, is not in time and is therefore eternity. The now is the place where all talk of time and space occurs, to put it metaphorically. In order to stop mistaking unreal terms like energy for the real we must gain the necessary distance to see all this going on. We must have discovered a truth that is much more stable and solid and gives us the grounding to actually view all this dispassionately. We either have this or we don't, but it comes as a fruit of spiritual practice. It is not intellectual in nature, but is rather a felt truth that all intellectual enquiry is in search of whether we realise that or not. We realise this quite distinctly when we get it, and from this moment on we see intellectual truth in the proper light. Words like energy, time, space, mater and causality, from this moment on, take on a different reality. Just like a certain sound is heard when you see a blackbird, these are the words that you hear when you meet ignorant people. They come out of their mouths, or appear in what they write. They are real but represent the unreal, but all of this is real.

All the arguments that apply to causality and acausality also apply to time and space. All of these are fallacies, in that they are equally true and false. For example, Time exists nowhere else except as memory or anticipation. But these are always, and of necessity, present moment events and are therefore nothing other than beng itself. The solution is to recognise thoughts of time, space, causality and acausality as being instances of being. This is the process of philosophical truth evolving into Truth itself.

Causality and acausality are simply judgments made in ignorance. They are not processes in reality. It is only when we think they are, that we ask erroneous questions about reality, like 'what happened before the big bang?' If we imagine that reality can be thought about then we are bound to find ourselves in this confusion. Just learn to 'see' the causal thought or the acausal thought as events in themselves, that are not 'about' any reality but are themselves their own reality. Then reality becomes clear and stable and we can relax into it. They will continue to appear but we will no longer troubled about what causality and acausality thoughts signify because we see that they signify nothing beyond themselves. There is no signifier and no signified - both are the same thing.

If you want to learn, just look closely at your own life. You will notice when your charisma is high. People respond to you better, you notice people staring... Then just notice your own state of being at this time. You'll find it's exactly like johndoe describes. You are securely anchored in the present. You feel happy, amiable and at peace. You feel like a mountain and the world is passing by below you. You can actually feel the love flowing from your eyes. Cultivating charisma is deliberately putting your self in this mindset before you enter a situation. But first, like I said, keep an eagle eye on people and places where you were doing it effortlessly.

Dalai Lama is lovely guy but not a high level being. When it comes to explains Buddhism there are so many others who can do a lot better.

Hi Cheshire Cat I would say that love and Chi are the same thing. Both concepts that musn't be taken too seriously. But we have to say something... If there's one thing I've realised is that when it comes to the spiritual paths, one person's means are another person's ends. Or, in your terms, what looks like the aim is also, from another perspective, the instrument to reaching the aim. Dogen sums this up as practice and enlightenment are one. What we consciously do, happens automatically to our neighbour as a bonus side effect. Yes, and there are lots of people on this website who need to understand this. All this talk about Chi and channels and meridians is taken much too seriously...but at the same time we have to start by taking it very seriously.

Hi Marblehead, It's easy to avoid them and love them at the same time. This is my point. Loving a person is an inner experience or attitude. it doesn't necessarily need any outer behaviour to go with it. This loving attitude is absolutely its own reward. You are right that love gets misused, but only because we confuse ourselves over what love involves. If you love only on certain conditions of some kind of payback, then that is a lesser kind of love. Or, more accurately, it is a perfect love that gets shared between yourself and the other. When self love is an absolute given, you don't need anything back and you are free to love unconditionally. In the OP I talked about the loneliness of realising that nobody was able to give me anything. It is a miserable state, but fundamentally based on the self-realisation that has come from practice - and self-realisation is intrinsically pleasurable. It is total self-infatuation. If they need to deserve our love in some way, then it is obviously not unconditional love we are giving. You must see that. Therefore you are effectively denying the possibility of unconditional love. This is yet another example of you refusing the transcendental perspective, isn't it? You do it philosophically with your 'materialism' and now you're doing it affectively with your 'love must be deserved'. What on earth is the point of your interest in Taoism if you refuse to transcend. It is the soteriology that gives it all the value! Without this Taoism is just another description of the to's and fro's of life. Do you not yearn to go higher than adjustment to the way things already are? Or maybe you just like being controversial and you don't mean it? Come on, admit it!

Please tell me more! Although I don't worry that you can go too far with this kind of love. It's very warm but very subtle and incredibly wholesome feeling. I think love can only go too far when the mind is involved and the love gets projected onto one specific object - this is pure madness compared to transcendental love. Or, people get it into their heads that they should go around lovebombing everyone and everything and generally make themselves an insufferable nuisance.

I think going beyond the concepts of love and hate for specifics is what leads at first to the Dark Night. If you genuinely manage this then, yes, externals do affect us less...a lot less. In fact we find ourselves not caring for them at all because we feel above them. We watch them happening below us on the ground. But, how can I put it...life lived like this gets so dry - it can't be sustained. You yearn for the old enthusiasms but at the same time you know that you will never return to them. You have incurably gone beyond the concepts love and hate. The solution is the Love that is no concept - the Love that does not have 'hate' as an opposite. It is the Love that makes no sense, but only fills your days with a perfectly aimless enthusiasm. Whatever happens is fine by you - this is transcending love and hate with the bonus discovery of the transcendental Love. This is the true goal, but it is so shockingly radical. It is a total departure from normal human existence. It can't even be talked about. But yes, we must transcend love and hate at the level of the Mind first AND tolerate all the shit that doing that will bring in our day to day lives.

Exactly what you do about this wedding is relatively unimportant. The broader issue is that you need to feel able to associate with other people without their happiness being a threat. Obviously, if you have more happiness of your own you would genuinely be able to rejoice in theirs. I said it in the other thread: your happiness depends on getting your own life on track. This wedding episode is just more evidence that you cannot and will not tolerate your lifestyle as it currently stands. It is becoming more and more oppressive to you, and now you don't want to participate in things that should be fun. I know you're shit scared of change. But I promise you that if you find work where you have lots of colleagues, men and women, people will like you, find you interesting and your life will take off. And yes, the next wedding probably will be yours... Come on Dreambliss! Why not start some constructive chat about how to get going with this...?

Some people have a sudden experience like yours which happens out the blue and is not sustained. The experience however is life changing and must be somehow incorporated into their everyday life, both at the level of understanding and in terms of behaviour. You describe yourself as sceptical. Often sceptics are just sceptical about some things, for example, religion, and mostly dogmatic when it comes to conventional scientific descriptions. The fact that you wonder about how to explain it shows that you haven't intellectually integrated the experience yet. This may take some time, involve lots of reading and conversation, and at one point you may feel the need to adopt some kind of specific practice. One thing is absolutely sure: you won't be able to rest until this integration is complete. The experience will return, although not necessarily as a cataclysmic episode. From now on there might be a subtle transformation which will slowly fill your life with peace, happiness and wisdom. I thought your description was fascinating, thoughtful and well written. I think you have experienced something really special. You may not like the spiritual associations, but these narratives seem to be the only ones available for what we can more neutrally call changes in consciousness. Perhaps with time you'll feel more sympathetic to talking about things in this way. I really hope you stay here at TDB to share your journey with us!

So say you're a maths teacher at high school. Your students all know the basic arithmetic that we use in everyday life already. You're now teaching them the higher stuff: algebra, geometry, calculus. This is the stuff that is needed in specific careers like computer science, statistics, aeronautics. So you, the teacher are teaching them in the hope that they do what you are NOT doing. You wish them to apply it outside of the classroom in the world of science and technology. How does it go with the spiritual teacher? Is the person who spends all their time teaching the highest example? Or are there higher practitioners who are the one time pupils and the justification for the teacher' s life spent in teaching? Are any of us encountering clearly awakened individuals who themselves aren't teaching, but doing other activities? Thanks for your views on this!

I never meet people like your lawyer. Maybe I should hang out in ashrams more.

Thanks Vanir, I guess what you saying is that there is no comparison between a maths teacher and a spiritual teacher. Maybe the term teacher is misleading. There are just people who are spiritually realised and their presence sets an example. Do you think that some kind of teaching or transmission automatically ensues upon realisation?