Nikolai1

Hi Perceiver OK, here's another way of putting it... Time is an entirely thought based notion. We can't detect or see time, smell it, hear it. We are only aware of time when we are thinking. Just as a smell is airborne, time is thoughtborne. Now the trick is to learn to see a thought as being another object in our reality. Like a smell, it wafts in and then out of consciousness forever. Thoughts, therefore, are not about anything separate to themselves. A thought is NOT a representation of anything - this is most important A thought is its own reality, entire in its itself. Just as the table before you refers to nothing but itself, so too does a thought. A thought stands unique and independently. Thoughts are material realities, although normally witnessed in a dim shadowy light compared to other material realities. if we learn to view thoughts this way, we can start to see that time does not exist outside of the thought of time. And the thought of time, is just something that comes, endures for the briefest instant, and then vanishes forever. As we learn to view time in this way, we also learn that the part of us which seems to exist in time, which is the individual ego, is also just another thought which has no enduring reality. To distance ourselves from our ego is to become acquainted with who we really are, and this knowledge is the basis for all the deja vu and the synchronicity which is natural to the person who knows who they really are. The vision of reality I am talking about is of massive significance to anyone on the spiritual path, so its really worth engaging with it. Keep asking me if things aren't clear, because I have many different ways of communicating this worldview. All the best Nikolai

But Moonninite still hasn't said what he's talking about? Or maybe it was moths and its conversation over?

Floaters are different. Everyone has them.

sent by pm instead

3 !!! Thanks

I only have 2 stars -does this mean everyone hates me?

Hi all, Deja vu and Jamais vu are both pretty strange when we experience them, but they are basically subjective. Reality isn't matching up to what we feel on the inside - that is the only uncanniness. The next level is when things actually happen in reality that don't follow the normal laws of time and space. Level 2 Synchroncity This is when we are able to make links of meaning between this situation and other situations in the same way as we do when we think we have previous knowledge. But the links of meaning in synchronicity make absolutely no sense in the normal laws of time and space and therefore can't be based on knowledge. This is because our transcendence of the illusion of time is also a transcendence of the way things conventionally happen in time. Phenomena, we realise, are linked together in ways that start to seem quite uncanny. Things that we normally view as symbols - and so merely superimposed on events - we now recognise play a meaningful part in the flow. In spring its not unusual to see the daffodil repeatedly everywhere we go. But now we see the same words, the same series of numbers time after time. We are aware of a depth of meaning to everything that we never thought possible. Objects are normally just objects. But now they appear as motifs in our day, just like symbols in a dream. Whether we understand the symbols or not, the world has an uncanniness. It feels at time like we are dreaming it all up, or like Orion says, that we create the world of time and space rather than perceive it. The world opens up, we see meaning in more types of ways and therefore our understanding of the world is more comprehensive and our actions more effective. It is only when we loosen our attachment to the way things normally happen in time and space, that divination techniques start to work. We can consult the I Ching, and understand and expect that the appropriate hexagram will arise just as the appropriate flowers will arise as the sun gets warmer. People who cannot understand the true nature of time will be intellectually bound to conventional understandings. Synchronicity will not happen for them, only mild coincidence explainable by the laws they know so well. I Ching won't give any meaningful response, and they will have no choice but to discredit it as superstition. But they are spared the darker side to synchronicity which doesn't get talked about as much, although lots of us have experienced it. Dyssynchroncity This is where we start to lose the intense powers of intuition we had into our own life story. Remember, knowledge based on experience is and always was a myth. The knowledge we had as indivduals was not based on the past, but were powerful intuitions allowed by our very strong belief that we knew about ourselves. When we see the true nature of time, we are expanded and the world opens up - but our knowledge of who we are as individual egos actually contracts. How does it feel? Well the opposite of synchronicity. Things that we expect to happen, don't happen. Things go wrong, or projects fail. Things we think we should know, we suddenly find ourselves not knowing. And they get interpreted by us and others as lapses of memory so shocking that it seems we have a medical problem. It takes a lot of faith and understanding to realise that this is normal for us. It can be pretty mortifying. Skills and abilities we would expect to learn easily we find we do not. All our colleagues take to the new computer system like a duck to water, but we struggle for a long time. We seem fated to fail at some things. Things aren't happening as they should. Its baffling. Also, things lose their sense and meaning. Activities that once filled us with a wealth of purpose and connected us to our situation now leave us cold and alienated from the people in our lives. You get the picture. We change as people, and all we can do is surrender to the fact that anything not essential to you Way, will fall by the wayside...but the essential will grow in meaning and manifest itself. To see the timelessness of time is simultaneously to grow into a whole new person, but also to stop being the person you once were. I'll talk about the next level tomorrow otherwise these posts get too long. Best to you all!

Hi perceiver, Let's imagine I meet my friend and best man in a bar for a beer. The music, the barmaid are all part of the scene and so is the mental imagery of the wedding and the stag party. They all arise in that moment together. It is an illusion to think that some of these phenomena are in the present and some are memories. Even my fiend is a complete stranger to me, but my attitude is that I know him already, and this attitude empowers me to make all sorts of direct and relevant intuitions (although you could also say they arise automatically as part of the flow) There is a different koan that captures this: When the Master Daito saw the Emperor Godaigo who was another student of Zen the master said: " We were parted many thousands of years ago, yet we have not been separated even for a moment. We are facing each other all day long, yet we have never met." Actaully the first sentence refers to the illusion of space; it is the second that deals with the illusion of time. Hope this helps!

My own theory for the bright lights is this: As we cultivate our minds we become more orientated towards eternity and less towards the indvidual things that exist in time and space. This attitude means that our gaze becomes softer and milder and less intensely focussed on things. This means that the fovea - a dense cluster of light detecting cells on the retina - starts to become less dense and the cells more evenly distributed across the retina. Just as it was when we were newborn babies before the fovea developed. This will also mean that our fovea becomes more reflective of light coming in. Spiritual cultivation makes your eyes brighter and more twinkly. These changes at the retina create the flashes of bright white light. On a medical note, anyone experiencing the medical condition of retinal detachment will also get bright white flashes though not for the same reasons.

I get brightly glowing orbs a lot. They mostly come in bright white but also blue sometimes. I love them but can't explain them.

what colour are they?

Hi Michael, Wow! Isn't this fascinating and beautiful. I've never thought of that before. Saturn is a kind of symbol of the solar system. Itself plays the role of the sun and the ring is the image of the orbiting planets. But yes, our role is to stop seeing ourselves as both separate to the sun, and as suns ourselves - capable of our own light. The light is one. The mind of man and the mind of God are not different unless we believe they are. Like when Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6 " Ye are Gods"

Hi all, When we learn to see time in its true sense, everything changes for us. It starts a complete revolution in how we view understanding. If there is no 'flow' to time - if time is something that just arises in conjunction with the object and then passes away again - it follows that there is no such thing as 'past experience'. Everything we 'know' comes in the form of a direct, and entirely novel intuition. I look at the face of my friend and I also see time. I intuit the day we met, the things we share. But we have never met before, I only believe we have, and it is this belief that gives my intuition full power and accuracy and makes my friend someone I can share with. Empiricism is an illusion. We do not accumulate knowledge over the course of time. To believe in our own learning history is to place limits on our own understanding. To remove this limit, which shall happen when we learn to properly understand time, is to give ourselves the ability of intuiting things we never thought possible. Skills of clairvoyance are facts, and are just everyday styles of knowing performed by those who are not confined by their own learning history. Believe in clairvoyance and you shall become clairvoyant. The average individual believes in their own life story very very strongly. This means that they are highly clairvoyant in those situations which relate to their own story. On the other hand, they are almost entirely unclairvoyant in anything that they they believe they haven't experienced. Understand time correctly, and your own life story will become less clear because you believe less in your learning history, but you will also become more clear in what isn't part of your life story. So I've already noticed the changes in my own life. Strange things occur at three levels of strangeness. The first level is pretty common even in those who have a conventional view of time. Level 1 Deja vu This is a transitional situation where our minds are still in the conventional time view but our feelings are beyond time. At the intellectual level we recognise that the situation is completely new but in our feelings we are directly understanding it as if there was something in our learning history. Its a kind of vague feeling where it seems we can predict what will happen next in this strange scene but we have no clear cognitions. Although deja vu is common, there are lots of people who don't get it and cant understand it. They think they experience deja vu when things are simply repetitious. This is not the same thing. Jamais vu This is the mirror image of deja vu. Here our time based minds are telling us that the situation is old and familar - an everyday occurrence in our life story - and yet it feels to us so new, so fresh, so unexpected. We may have done this drive to the office everyday for ten years and yet it barely seems possible. Never has the kebab shop on the right been seen until this very moment. Can it be true that these daffodils have been appearing here for the last 38 years? Deja vu and jamais vu together show the 'opening up' of our egos. We are starting to feel affinity where they should be none, and no affinity when there should be affinity. We are becoming less of a distinct personality because we have seen through the illusion of time. OK, it gets stranger, but this is getting long so I'll take about Levels 2 and 3 tomorrow. Best wishes, Nikolai

And all this is something we experience directly. That's the point I want to make, and when it does it is completely life changing.

I guess I'm more thinking about those behaviours that just seem meaningless to someone who has realised that they are not their ego. A lot of people's behaviour is about chasing pleasures and avoiding pain. A person who has realised their divine self is so much more at peace than before that hey can' t pleasure seek with the same gusto. A lot of people are seeking status or power which is maybe the search for love. But realise the divine self and you don't need love from the outside.

Wow I like this alot! But if we see that ego is a false identity then what about all the things that egos love and are motivated by? Are they false too? Nearly everyone believes in the reality of the ego and the world's activity is based on egoic desires. What does the person beyond the ego do with themselves from now on? What motivates them? How do they fit in?

If there's no difference why do the sages make the distinction? Those on earth must first find heaven and then realise that it's the same as earth and that earth always was heaven.

If an image gives you peace and security and a sense that whatever happens is well with you then that image is working! And if this feeling spills out into your everyday life and allows you to be open and fearless and loving and appreciative of all the beauty in the world then the image is working well I say! Do you know what I love about mt spiritual path? It's the insight into things that I never had before. And I love all the coincidence, the synchronicity. I live the increase in meaning and the peace and confidence it brings. When I was young I was pretty nihilistic, even at 10 years old it started. To find meaning has been like finding true love for me.

Hi Gerard Say what you like. But prove to me that the one God isn't you? In John 10.34 Jesus was accused of blasphemy by claiming to be God. Why was he wrong to say back "It is written in your own Scriptures that God said to the leaders of the people, 'I say, you are gods!" Don't go out of yourself, who is the guy who saw all this stuff in your meditations?

Hi Soaring Crane, Yes of course this is the view that I held before - that time and space are fundamental properties of the universe. Now I would say that time is neither real nor unreal - its perfectly valid to understand the universe in time, but there is another vantage point - the timelessness of the witness state. And to see the second vantage point is to realise that the first is now only provisionally true. So what does this mean for those Taoist terms Heaven and Earth? Earth is the place where time and space are real. People who believe in them are earth dwellers. Heaven is the place of timelessness and spacelessness. The place I went to in my sudden realisation. This is the view that falsifies the view of earth. Who is that understands all this? The Great Tao. I am nothing other than the Great Tao seeing itself.

Hi Perceiver Yes, this is just like what I was saying. To see time in this way is itself a raising of the consciousness. You become the eternally still point from which all change is perceived. But the only reality is you, yourself - the still point - and the world of things that change in time are nothing more than a kind of metaphor for yourself. Or perhaps a kind of mirror image or a photograph which captures a certain likeness but is actually flat and lifeless. This is a really wonderful subject and meditating on the nature of time is a very powerful spiritual practice for those who are philosophical. I don't know of any books about this, but looking back I realise that Buddha's teachings on impermanence have influenced me and helped to see this stuff.

Well at least the address matches now. But this accented A business? We haven't used phonetic accents in English for centuries. The ö, as in coöperation lasted longer but was dropped at least 100 years ago. Nobody knows what they mean anymore. That accent does not indicate to anyone how better to pronounce the word. Just looks pretentious.

The truth that mind can and does influence matter is strongly recognised by modern medicine. Tell a patient that the sugar pill you give them is powerful medicine and it shall heal them of what you tell them it shall heal. It is called the placebo effect and it is real. In the second world war, surgeons discovered that when morphine stocks ran out, they could perform pain-free amputations simply by injecting their patients with salt water. If we believe we shall be healed then that healing shall come to pass. Likewise, if our doctor tells us we are ill, then, like a voodoo curse, our belief in his words shall create actual bodily suffering. Is it not surprising that something so utterly miraculous as this is happening before our eyes? We imagine that the purported healing power of old religious relics is something belonging to the superstitious past, and yet the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals would not publish a clinical trial unless the voodoo magic intervention is included as a control. All this shows that the healing powers of medical drugs are not contained within themselves. Any power they hold is precisely what we give to them through our original beliefs. But what happens to the person who has no beliefs? What happens to that person who understands that the drug has no power beyond what we give it? The person who has 'seen through' all their beliefs. If we are no longer naive to the truth then the placebo cannot work for us, nor the religious relic, nor any of the manifold things in this world that we normally will give us what we believe we lack. When we understand through the notion of the placebo that our beliefs can create our reality there is no way of knowing whether all our reality is not set-created. And yet we can not voluntary choose our beliefs. Such chosen beliefs have no power, no conviction, they seem arbitrary. We no longer have a very solid world 'out there' with its own laws that we can believe in unequivocally. Our beliefs are suddenly very weak and first and do not have the power to create our reality. This is why we defend ourselves against this painful truth. It leaves us ungrounded, and paradoxically leaves us less empowered than we were before. Without the laws of nature to believe in, there is nothing else that gives us the power of conviction? And yet neither can we go back to where we were. Our old beliefs, once exposed as ungrounded, no longer fill us with conviction either. We are stranded, and yet filled with a painful realisation. We must truly create our own future, for ourselves, by ourselves and without the comfort of external constraints. But this isn't as hard as it first looks. We do not have to pluck a future arbitrarily from the air. What happens is that conviction comes to us once again, only this time it is not belief based as before, but based on the direct power of revelation. We find that somehow we KNOW what should happen, what will happen, and how to act. This has been called the voice of the holy spirit, or wuwei, or simply spontaneous living. Unlike the lawfulness of the world, and the everyday people that live in it, the person living spontaneously is hard to predict. The familiar reasons and methods don't apply. And neither can they account for themselves. Do not ask them to predict anything. They are an enigma even to themselves, and yet their actions are not random. They are appropriate and skilful. It seems they are guided by God himself! Best wishes guys!

Hi blue eyed snake, When you read my posts I've invoked he idea of a shared consciousness rather a lot, so we're not disagreeing there. In a clinical trial it is the fully conscious expectation of healing that creates the healing, and it is the full that makes it so powerful. Information that comes from the shared consciousness very rarely enters individual consciousness except when the sense of selfhood is reduced, as in sleep. But just because it isn't in full consciousness doesn't mean that it isn't influencing our behaviour. This is how the students reacted unconsciously to the LSD in the coffee in accordance with the more powerful conscious beliefs held by the person who spiked the coffee. The only reason its hard to think yourself well is because we very strongly associate ourselves with our bodies, and all the biochemical imbalances our body has. The only antidote to this is any authentic spiritual activity which leads us to know that our true identity has nothing whatsoever to do with our bodies. When we know this, it is just the same to think ourselves well or ill. This is a very bog point and pretty much divided people on the subject of the placebo. Simply put, if you don't know your True Self, you have no choice but to know yourself falsely, which is as individual bodies and minds. No doubt about, realising that our private consciousness might actually be shared is a very big step beyond the narrowness of ego life. But the highest point is when we realise that there are no actual individual entities to do the sharing. Then consciousness becomes one. You can see three levels of truth - the private, the shared and the universal. Each level is the truth for those who haven't awakened to the higher level. We agree on Anita Moorjani. The important point I took from it was that she needed no regime of treatment, no beliefs in a regime. All she got was realisation of her true self and that was healing enough. This is the true healing that I have been talking about since the beginning of this thread. From the highest perspective, all auxillary beliefs about healing regimes are just that, auviliary and a distraction. This is why I have argued against any suggestion of biochemical role. You say ego dissolvement is not something that happens daily. I agree, which is why I have consistently supported and endorsed the pharmaceutical industry and recommend anyone to see their doctor unless they 100% know and believe that they don't need to. I always try to argue from the highest perspective my mind has reached. Unfortunately truth at the high level is falsehood at the lower, which is why I've had little sympathy on this thread. All the Best to you, Nikolai

I think this DÀO thing looks silly and it doesnt match the site address. Change it back is my wish.