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Transcendental God. A belief in no god is about the same as a belief in god,...both are beliefs. All dictionary definitions of god are conditions,...the transcendent is not. God defined by Webster's: 1. A being (condition) conceived as the omnipotent (condition), omniscient (condition) originator and ruler (condition) of the universe (condition), the principal object (condition) of faith and worship (conditions) in monotheistic religions (conditions). 2. The force (condition), effect (condition), or a manifestation or aspect (conditions) of this being (condition). 3. A being of supernatural powers (condition) or attributes (conditions), believed in and worshiped (conditions) by a people, especially a male deity thought to control some part of nature or reality (conditions). 4. An image of a supernatural being; an idol (conditions). 5. One that is worshiped, idealized, or followed (conditioned). A very handsome man (condition). A powerful ruler or despot (conditions). In the 9 dimensions of Vajrayana and Bon, the belief in theism ends at the lower 5th density of consciousness,...what researcher Robert Monroe called 'Religious Terminus.' Although the transcendental can be experienced in lower levels, the transcendental itself begins at the middle 5th density. The 6th is the nirvana level,...7th and 8th, the Vajra and Buddhic fields,....while the 9th is actually a non-dimension, that is, Source. Source is a synonym for Undivided Light. Undivided Light is proof that no god exists. Here and Now. To have a 'here' there must be a 'there' (subject-object, center-boundary, yin-yang). There is no "now" is the "here," just as there is no present in time. Here and Now is thus an important oxymoron for those who wish a more intimate understanding of the first absolute bodhichitta, which is, to see all one perceives as a dream. The 'here', like thought, is always in the past. Anyone wishing to Gnow Thyself (gnothi seauton) must uncover the present. Before one can gnow Who they are, one must realize When they are. The permanent, unchanging Self is not in the past. Individual Wholeness. Individual and Other are delusions of duality, just as One and Many. There is no Individual without an other, nor a One without a Many. In another post I mentioned,...Visualize a keyhole for a moment, one of those slotted holes that can be peeped through, as in old Colonial and Victorian homes. Now, describe that hole. Some may say that it has the shape of a circle with a rectangle whose width is smaller than the diameter of the circle aligned on the bottom; others could respond that the hole is surrounded by a brass plate that is attached to the door, which is connected to the wall, etc. Perhaps the hole could be looked through, so one could remark about what is seen on the other side. However, none of that actually describes the hole; all of the preceding descriptions are narratives about what is around or can be seen through the hole. Nevertheless, that is how most persons, especially Westerners and scientists, perceive their own wholeness: by what is around it. If that didn't satisfy, please continue for clarifications. V

Hehe, I just wanted to say that in my dreams I actually only have girls check me out when I become awesome and great fun to hang out with. If I'm talking with Conan the barbarian or jesus in my dream, the girls are not checking me out. It is pretty similar to real life actually sometimes. It just feels more energetic and intense in a dream. More important and rich and vivid... More colourful. Its weird how dreams become so true to the soul sometimes.

Nice story. If you stay open, you can give love and receive love. Opening up, being yourself, naked, true, spontaneous. However, you are also prone to be hurt. So you must know when it is time to love the earth and when it is time stay calm and detached. If an animal eats you while you are appreciating him, you will become sad and think "why is this animal doing me wrong?" While it your mindset that is innaprorpiate in the firstplace and you are doing thus yourself wrong. It is all an illusion, a dream, if you have a the wrong mindset in any given situation. And since the situations in our life are ever changing, we must constantly wake up, constantly become lucid and aware. You must constantly change the perception of the planet to fit in. To be closer to harmony, effortlessness, the flow. Stay in love mode as much as you can, but learn the typical situations where you must become tranquil, detached, increased awareness of the senses, perceiving perception. Like a samurai warrior, feeling pain and not suffering from it, but rather acting as efficiently as possible and not becoming angry or wasting energy. Ususally these typical situations can be recognized by the fact that your emotions become negative. When you appreciate life, life is ABLE to appreciate you back. When you suffer from life, you become detached so that life cannot possible make you suffer. When you are deprived of life, you start to appreciate it again. When you suffer, you decide not to suffer anymore, by detaching from it. Being reborn in more wise way. You start to detach from all the situations you have suffered, and just observe the pain. But a return to love and a departure from it is just an eternal journey that must be appreciated and detached from on itself. If you appreciate life; some times life does not appreciate you back, other times life appreciates you back. A warrior loves his family, and he is not angry towards the enemies he is forced to fight. In the end, the whole world cries for the battles that has been fought. Why? Because we cannot live without love... We cannot ignore the horrors for ever. The more we cry, the more we see the disharmony arise. That is why your story is so important for many warriors. It opens them up, see their true nature and love. Like Tao Te Ching. Without it, warriors would eventually starve from a lack of love. This way we can live in harmony.... In a cooperative world.

How was he self lit? He independently originated enlightenment without inter-dependent influence? That's not true... From Wiki: Life Tilopa was born into the brahmin (priestly) caste – according to some sources, a royal family – but he adopted the monastic life upon receiving orders from a dakini (female buddha whose activity is to inspire practitioners) who told him to adopt a mendicant and itinerant existence. From the beginning, she made it clear to Tilopa that his real parents were not the persons who had raised him, but instead were primordial wisdom and universal voidness. Advised by the dakini, Tilopa gradually took up a monk’s life, taking the monastic vows and becoming an erudite scholar. The frequent visits of his dakini teacher continued to guide his spiritual path and close the gap to enlightenment. He began to travel throughout India, receiving teachings from many gurus: from Saryapa he learned of inner heat (Sanskrit: caṇḍalī, Tib. tummo, inner heat); from Nagarjuna he received the radiant light (Sanskrit: prabhasvara) and illusory body (Sanskrit: maya deha, Tib. gyulu) teachings (refer Chakrasamvara Tantra), Lagusamvara tantra, or Heruka Abhidharma); from Lawapa, the dream yoga; from Sukhasiddhi, the teachings on life, death, and the bardo (between life states, and consciousness transference) (phowa); from Indrabhuti, he learned of insight (prajna); and from Matangi, the resurrection of the dead body. During a meditation, he received a vision of Buddha Vajradhara and, according to legend, the entirety of mahamudra was directly transmitted to Tilopa. After having received the transmission, Tilopa embarked on a wandering existence and started to teach. He appointed Naropa, his most important student, as his successor.

The atman view is different because it assumes an eternal entity that passes from body to body until it reaches enlightenment as if there is a soul residing in the body that is aware. Or an independent mind, true self, etc. It's really the other way around that the appearance of body and the appearance of life and death is experienced by the mind. When you fall asleep and dream of a new body and a new environment, it is incorrect to believe that an entity has traveled from the awaking state to the dream state. Rather it is just projections of the mind's contents dependently originating on the conditions it supposes. It's just been your mind experiencing itself all along. But aside from Buddhism I like to just investigate what exactly it means for one to be aware. As in, what is the nature of our aliveness, the sense of being. We usually take granted the idea of the duality of there being a subject and an external object that it experiences. Or that somehow one is the causes or conditions for the other, just as popular science says the brain is where our consciousness rises. Or that our awareness is dependently originated. What can we directly verify and what is mere speculation? Just strip it down to the bare minimum of what we can know directly from experience without suggestions from science or religion. Note to Xabir/TCO/Vaj, let's please not start an argument among us. Just post our views and move along.

You're not out your depth. Just consider the nature of meanings. All the things you experience, external and internal have meanings. For example, tea cup means something. It has a certain function. It's used in a certain context. You don't wear tea cups on your feet. Trees have a meaning. Trees do not swim in the ocean. Fish have meaning. Fish don't serve as light bulb filaments. Inside copper wires it is not wind that flows. Why not? Well, that's not the meaning of wind. That is not how we know wind. Now, meanings only make sense in some kind of context. For example, it makes no sense for wind to blow if there is no space. Tea cups make no sense without tea. Tea makes no sense without someone to drink and enjoy it. Fish make no sense without the ocean. The ocean makes no sense without the Earth. And so on up to infinity. This context stretches infinitely and not a single meaning within the context can be called "first." There is no first. And there is no last. When you were born, you recognized people. You did not confuse eyes with squid, even though if your mind were blank at birth, there is every reason to think that your perceptions should have been scrambled randomly or even absent altogether. Right from birth you had enough context to learn a few things. You learned how to walk and talk, but you did not learn what it means for a person to look directly at you. You knew that. Your mother did not have to teach you, "When my head is angled such and such, and when my eyeballs are angled such and such, that means I am looking at you." No one had to teach you this. You knew this and infinitely more from before birth, or else you'd not be able to make enough sense to learn anything. To learn new meanings you need some pre-existing context, which you had. So mind does not start at birth. If the mind did not start at birth, it does not end at death. You may think that something like matter exists, something that is external to mind that backs up appearances. That can be disproved also, but I am not going to do that in this post. There is nothing outside your mind. No matter. No energy. Everything you see is just the play of your consciousness like a dream or a mirage, or like a magic show. You were never born. This world was never created out of matter. Matter only appears to follow the energy conservation principle because of the mental habits you've accumulated from beginningless time, and so on. Once you consider all this it is trivial to see that rebirth is a logical view.

Master Gyozan has a dream. He went to Maitreya's place and was given the third seat. A venerable monk there struck the table with a gavel and announced, "Today the talk will be given by the monk of the third seat." Gyozan struck the table with the gavel and said, "The Dharma of Mahayana goes beyond the Four Propositions and transcends the One Hundred Negations. Listen carefully!" - Mumonkan. 25

Reincarnating on the same planet is like going to bed and having the same dream you had the previous night, on purpose. It's possible, but it hardly ever happens, and when it does happen, you can't be quite sure if it's really the same or just very similar. For most intents and purpose I assume when beings are dead, they reincarnate, but never here in this realm. I suppose there could be some exceptions. Out of all the dreams I've had, I believe I've had an experience of returning to the previous dream only a few times. Most of the dreams are completely unique. So I think reincarnation is like that too. As for whether the nature feels impersonal and brutal or not, that depends hugely on your beliefs about nature. If you believe nature is one giant machine, yes, you'll get caught in its gears and it will grind you up just as you believe.

"Buddha: With his wisdom, a Buddha really understands the truth, whereas ordinary people live like in a dream, an illusion that prevents us from understanding reality properly." The flesh body color is irrelevant since the flesh body dimension is an illusion. We speak about different "worlds" and I would like to go to a higher "world" soon and stop wasting my time at my current level. I hope you can understand me or at least respect my wish to do that.

I'll reply to myself and do what I consider to be an acceptable job answering my own questions. 1. Whatever one finds manifested is intentional. If that's the case, why can't ordinary people say readily go through walls? That's a logical question. On the face of it this situation suggests that certain things are outside the scope of intent. But what is really going on here? As it turns out, our experiences are structured by our beliefs. Beliefs are stable intent formations. So when we tacitly and implicitly believe that all objects must have a property of spacial integrity we find that our experience conforms to this because of the principle number 1. Beliefs are said to be stable in the sense that once you believe something, you don't need to make a conscious effort to continue believing that same thing. They are formations because beliefs have a certain character or shape to them, albeit an abstract one. Another belief we might have is a belief about intent itself. If we believe our intentionality only extends to our "physical" body and no further, and that objects outside our body have natures independent of our intent, again, thanks to principle 1, our experience will conform to that belief. Of course we don't just have two beliefs. We have many beliefs. Often these beliefs support each other and need each other to be true. So for example of what might happen, imagine someone begins questioning the belief in object integrity and experiences sliding through an object previously or customarily considered solid. At this point all kinds of questions and alarm will appear, such as, "Is this real? Am I dreaming? Where is the real world? Is my mother safe? My father? Am I dead?" Why so many questions? Well, because one has a worldview. A worldview is a collection of beliefs that describe the world as we know it. If one of these beliefs is found to be false or flexible, it throws all the other beliefs into question. So if this one is not quite true, what else is not quite true? This is very scary and most people go right back to ordinary life after something like this happens. It is because beliefs resonate with each other, they stick together and support each other that this happens. People who learn not to be scared by strange stuff are said to have developed tolerance of the inconceivability of phenomena. It simply means magic is no longer scary. It's not scary because the world as an ordinary person might know it is gone and it's OK for it to be gone. Instead a different world manifests. This different world reflects the new worldview. If someone performs a magical action over and over regularly it stops being perceived as magical and becomes ordinary. What is considered magical is relative and unstable. In some realms going through walls is ordinary. In other realms it is magical because it's rare and poorly understood. In others it is impossible. So in a sense all actions are magical. Even walking and breathing are magical in some sense, but we don't see it that way because it's so ordinary and common. For a being who has dwelt in a formless realm for one aeon, having a physical body would be very strange and scary, and also very magical. For us, even a taste of the formless realm is scary and magical. Besides beliefs there is also a force of habit to contend with. So for example, suppose I believe I can exercise, but I don't. Why is that? That's because avoiding exercise is habitual. Once exercise becomes a habit, it's hard to stop. So habits have force of their own regardless of beliefs. This leads us to the second principle: 2. Phenomena tend to continue. This describes the tendency of patterns to be stable, even in the absence of supporting beliefs. So for example, one time I had a lucid dream. In the dream I knew beyond doubt all my surroundings were nothing more than my mind's creations. So I tried to go through the wall and failed. I just bounced off the wall. So even though I believed it was definitely possible, I still bounced off. Why is that? Well, habit was a large part of it. I was so used to bouncing off objects that it was hard to do otherwise. Also, I had to think what would it be like to go through the wall. I mean, I couldn't even imagine it. Is it like moving through tooth paste? Or is it like moving through space? Or like through water? Will I feel the wall inside my body? There are many options. I decided moving through the wall should feel like moving through space while not feeling anything special inside my body. Then I focused and meditated for a few seconds and successfully went through the wall just as I wanted. Similarly in many lucid dreams I've been able to fly, but not in all. Why not? Again, when I am lucid not only do I know I can fly, but I even know I've done it many times, so it's not even all that unusual. Still, in some dreams I fail to fly anyway. Why? Sticking to the ground is a habit. Beliefs tend to continue because of the habit principle, but they are still intentional because no habit is outside intent. To get a feeling for how beliefs can be both intentional and outside one's conscious awareness imagine you wear a pair of shades because it's a sunny day. You get indoors and put the shades on top of your head. As your attention gets absorbed in this and that activity indoors you forget about the shades that are on top of your head. The shades are on your head intentionally but at the same time, you lose awareness of them because your attention become absorbed in something else. Similarly, people get absorbed in day to day minutia and forget many of the deep overarching beliefs that form the basis of their worldview. But still, all beliefs are intentional and they can all be changed, even if it's not easy to do so. So, someone who has challenged one's beliefs many times and thus softened them up is likely to encounter beings who demonstrate unusual powers of intent (siddhis). As one's beliefs continue to soften further, many siddhis become accessible to oneself directly. Someone who has very conservative, limited and restricted beliefs which are held very strongly, which haven't been softened in any way, is very unlikely to even meet or to even read about a person who can exercise the powers of intent. This explanation probably leaves some questions unanswered, but that's OK. It's already a long post.

Hello folks, I start this thread with a heavy heart, if only because I don't want what I am telling you to be misconstrued as a truth or an absolute about the human experience, but rather as my own experience. My experience differs from your experience, simply because there is no way for you to completely identify with it, so I ask first, that you don't identify with it, but rather listen to it. There's this idea that's been bouncing around in my head, sort of like a pinball bumping on bouncers with nowhere to go. What I've been thinking about is this notion of Love, not love, but Love with a capital L and what it really means. For me it took a long time to wrap my head around Love, no so much love. You see for me there is a difference in the two. Love, for me, in unconditional, in other words, Love with a capital L literally has no boundaries, nothing that holds it in and binds it, it is everything that I aspire to, without even knowing it. Love is that part of me that connects me to you and you to me, it is the part of me that resides within the kindest act and even the darkest act, although sometimes it's very hard to see. Love is a state of mind where you can look at someone who has done something completely beyond reasoning and say, "I hope things turn out well for them." It is being able to see the person still, the person that was and is and understanding that what that person is, isn't the entirety of that person, that somewhere within them still resides a piece worth loving. I know many of you are asking, "how can you love someone who has done something horrible? Really horrible?" Well it's not easy. I grew up in what most would consider an abusive home. My mother was mentally ill and my father was a sociopath. There's really no other way to describe them. My mother was prone to moods where she could be the most loving person in the world one moment, then in the next become a monster. This paradox made it hard for me to understand the concept of unconditional love, because for me there were very real conditions regarding love. If I woke my mother while she was napping she no longer loved me. If I brought her coffee and it was not made right, she no longer loved me, but then there were moments when it was different. On a Saturday afternoon when I was eight, I snuck into my parent's bedroom and stole all the money from my father's wallet. It was his entire paycheck and a bit more. I proceeded to go downtown and spend the money at the local ice cream shop. The owner knew my father, saw the amount of money I had and called my father. My father sent my brothers and sisters out to find me. I was standing on a bridge when I saw my sister coming, in a moment of panic I threw all the money over the side of the bridge, around two hundred dollars, which doesn't seem like a lot now, but this was the seventies, so think more like a thousand dollars. My sister took me home and my father beat me. Not a spanking, but a beating. It was one of the few times I remember my father hitting me. At the end I couldn't move. I remember I was so sore that even touching me stomach brought tears to my eyes. My mother took me in her arms and laid me in her bed beside her and held me, singing softly in my ear. It was hard for me to peg my mother as good or bad, because she was capable of both. Later in life I tended to remember the bad more than the good, but I bring this up as an example of how I was conditioned to think of love, how I was taught love worked. Another example of love came to me in a different manner. When I was a couple of months older and we had moved to a new town and new home a family friend came to stay with us. He was young, still in his teens, and he shared a room with me. A couple of weeks after he moved in with us, he started to sexually abuse me. At first it wasn't so bad, uncomfortable, but nothing really "horrible" at least not as horrible as I learned it could get. He stayed with us for two years before my parents kicked him out and I ended up having to endure his "love" for nearly two years. I say "love" because that's what he called it, he was "loving" me. To say that it ended up confusing me to no ends is an understatement, in fact it made it almost impossible for me to truly understand what love really was. So here, in this brief explanation of my life I share with you something I share very rarely, but now have no shame about, but at one time that wasn't so, at one time these moments of my life very much defined me as a person, as well as defined my own views on love and led me to believe that love didn't exist. So what changed my mind? Did I meet a person that unconditionally loved me, for good and bad, leading me down a path of righteousness? No, not in the least. In fact the majority of my relationships over the years were abusive and less than ideal. Did I stumble across love, see it in its natural form and suddenly realize that love existed, that it was real and concrete and perfect in all its adornments? No, that never happened either. What happened then? Well it's hard to explain. My first moment when I think I first experienced love was under the effects of a dream. I was twenty-two, I was very depressed, and I remember that I wanted to end it all, seriously end it all, not just a cry for help type of ending it, but a secretive, I'm not going to tell anyone and tomorrow I'm going to do it, type of depression. At that time I rarely prayed, but for some reason that night I did. I knelt before my bed with tears in my eyes and I prayed, "God, I can't take this anymore. If there's a reason for me being here, please show me, or else I'm going to kill myself tomorrow." Yes I know, very dramatic and twenty-ish. What happened though was amazing. I had a dream. In this dream a man came up to me and stabbed me. I remember the pain was very real and I felt very much like I was dieing. As my final moment passed, I found myself fading away, no body or anything else, just my self, for lack of a better explanation. I suddenly found myself in this vast space, not darkness mind you, just space. There seemed to be no direction or point of reference, just vast open space. Then slowly, balls of light appeared all around me, stationary, not moving, but just sitting there. After a brief period a voice suddenly spoke to me and I realized someone or something was with me. This voice said, "Aaron, you are on the Earth for a reason. You must learn a lesson. If you die you will come here. There is no time or space here, this place exists outside of the world, but it can reach the world. When you come here, you will then return to the world and be born again. You can be born in the past and in the future, it doesn't matter, because you will not remember anything from your previous life. You will keep coming here until you learn your lesson, then you will pass on from the world and this place." Now as this voice spoke I felt an overwhelming peace and serenity, unlike anything I had experienced before or since. I cannot even begin to describe it, my skin tingles when I remember it. It was the most amazing sensation I've ever had in my life, better than any drug or drink, it was absent of want or need, it was as if there was no want or need, just a complete sense of satisfaction, as if there were no wants or needs at all. Again, it's hard to explain. Anyways, I was trying to absorb what I had just been told, because it seemed to defy everything I had believed up until then as a good Christian. When I had finally understood what I had been told the voice asked me, "Do you understand." I thought, "yes." And that was that. I suddenly woke up the next morning, alive and well with the burden of depression lifted. How strange that I would find love in those words, but they are there. You see when we feel loved, it's because we feel that someone else values us, holds us as being something worth their attention. That being, when he helped me to realize that there was a reason for me being here, he also helped me to realize that I was worthy of love, and if I was worthy of love, then wasn't everyone else too? And that was my first glimpse, the spark that shook me ever so softly from a life of depression, sadness, and hopelessness, if only for a short while. You see that experience was enough to get me out of that rut for a short while, but it didn't erase the decades of abuse that I had experienced. In 1994 I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had horrible flashbacks of things that had happened to me earlier in life, flashbacks I couldn't control. They dictated my life. After several years I became agoraphobic, afraid to leave my home for fear of having a panic attack. I had drank from the time I was twenty-one, heavily, but at some point my drinking seemed to become the sole purpose of my life. My mother had told me that if you drank before five you were an alcoholic and I took that to heart. Everyday I would wait til five o'clock and then start to drink. For around ten years I followed the same regime, a twelve pack and a couple Mickie's Hornets. I functioned well, in fact most people never called me an alcoholic, after all I was a happy drunk, people liked being around me, or so I thought. I was oblivious to the amount of pain and suffering that my actions caused others and me. The fact I bounced checks, stole money, lied, cheated, did whatever it took to get a drink didn't seem strange to me, because I "needed" to drink. Towards the end I stopped being a happy drunk, instead my past started to come back and haunt me, even in the midst of my sanctuary. I became belligerent, hateful, and spiteful. I became a person I couldn't even stand to look at in the mirror. So all stories like this come to an end, most don't have happy endings, I was lucky, because mine did. It started with a fist fight and a threat of suicide. I remember as clear as day standing on my porch, the morning after hearing my brother describe to me what happened the night before, but not remembering a single bit and praying, even though I didn't really believe in prayer or God. I prayed, "God please just help me get to Monday and I'll go to an AA Meeting." And that's what I did. I got sober. I haven't had a drink since that day. I tell people that even in those dark years I read the Tao Teh Ching and meditated, and I did, but I can honestly say it was all dead, anything that sprung from it was ornamental at best. Yes, it did help me to keep my balance for a time, but eventually, even those with the best balance fall and I did too. So where does the love come into all of this? Well some of it came to me while I was learning how to be sober. I made a fearless and thorough examination of my life, how I had harmed others (not how others had harmed me) and I came to understand that my actions not only effect others, but also effect myself. Call it karma, just deserts, God's will, whatever, but I learned that if one wants peace and happiness in their life, then they need to sow peace and happiness. Still that's not love, Love came along later. You see three years into my recovery I had another breakdown of sorts. I was working as a collections agent for a major corporation and I got a strange call. The man on that call was drunk and he started to hit on me. First let me say, I'm forty-one, but most people by the sound of my voice think I'm a teenager, so did this guy. He started to ask me very uncomfortable questions. I started to get very scared and suddenly I had a flashback. In one second years of abuse came back and I felt completely helpless. I left work and went home and never returned. I lied and told people I was on reprieve, but really I was on a disability. My mental state had deteriorated to the point I couldn't leave the house. A sniff of cologne or perfume, someone touching me a certain way, saying something that seemed to click and I'd be back there. Anyways there was one night a few years backs that I remember particularly, I woke up in the middle of the night to find a young boy, around nine sitting in his pajamas at the end of my bed. He looked at me and said, "I'm scared, is he going to come for us?" I looked at the boy and realized he was me. I started to cry and I couldn't stop. I felt his hand on my leg and the little boy said, "don't be scared. I wont let him hurt you." For thirty years I had buried this little boy inside me. The little boy that came out when I was beaten, when I was abused. The little boy that took all my shame and pain and held it so I could survive, have a glimmer of hope in the human race. I had buried him and abandoned him, but he had never abandoned me. That night as I lay sad and lonely, frightened of things that had happened so many years ago, he came to me and let me know that he loved me, that even if no one else was there, he was always there for me. He stayed with me til I fell asleep and the next morning he was gone. So my first glimpse of Love, with a capital L, came from a boy who has never aged, a boy that lives deep inside of me, still to this day. I realize now that this has gone in a direction, the story and my life, that I never intended, but like I've been told before and I believe, if one reaches a state of contentment in their life, then they can look back on their life and have no regrets for the past, nor will they wish to shut the door on it. I don't have regrets anymore. Now, the big L came to me later. You see when I first hopped online I thought I knew what Taoism was all about and Buddhism, but really I didn't know shit, nor do I now, but I met someone who did. He was on another forum and it ended up that he lived about ten miles away from me. We met and had dinner. He listened to my off the wall crap regarding what Taoism was and said nothing really, just listened. We continued to meet and he started to share more and more, lend me books, give me his thoughts and ideas. Over the following months I began to learn about Taoism in an entirely different light, not the philosophical bull that I thought was Taoism, you know, morality, democracy, etc., but rather the experience of Tao. I stopped meditating for the first time in nearly twenty years. It was in that period of no-meditation that I began to really understand, because even though I didn't know it, I was actually meditating, I just wasn't sitting with my eyes closed not thinking, or being. Instead I was BEING, living and experiencing. I was still having flashbacks and such, but not anything too bad. It was during my conversations with him, where he started to share his belief that there really was no higher power, or conscious being in control of the universe, that my ideas of how the world worked slowly changed. My idea of Love changed. Love was no longer God, but rather it became a state of being, that perfect being that existed within us. Love for me was something that transcended pain and suffering, it was something that existed in the darkest night and brightest day. It rose above hatred and pain, above greed and suffering, and still sat silent and peaceful, like the eye within a hurricane, it was the solace that existed, safe and free of any suffering. Love was the ability to care for someone so completely that any notion of yourself is wiped away and all that matters is the well being of this other person. It's the notion that you and I are not separate at all, but rather we just see ourselves as separate. It's the ability to love you even if you do something I don't like. It's the ability to forgive you, not because I want forgiveness, but because I understand that you are worth forgiving. Love with a capital L is showing compassion for the boy at the foot of your bed, but also showing compassion for the young man that caused you so much pain so many years ago, if only because you can see the boy inside of him as well. Love with a capital L is being able to see through what is now and understand what has been, that in the blink of an eye, if only one thing shifted in a certain way, you could've been that young man. Love for me, today at least, is being able to look back at my life and see how lucky I really am to be where I am now. That all the things that have happened to me in the end opened up my eyes and mind so that I can REALLY see. I can understand that there is no "I", but rather there is only "It". Me, you, and the Universe. When I can see this, really see it, then everything that has come before, everything that should've turned me to a bitter, angry, lonely man, means nothing, because in that moment of real clarity you understand the futility of anger and loneliness and instead see that you are never really angry at someone else, but rather you are angry at yourself, and as for loneliness, well I just need to look out my window to realize I'm never really alone. Anyways, this was very long. I doubt many people will make it to the end, but it was cathartic (for me). I shared it with you because I thought it was time to share it. I honestly and truthfully hope life is treating you well, but if it isn't, then just know that you are here to learn a lesson. Aaron

We can say the reverse of this. If it weren't for dream contents, there would be no waking life experience. Do you agree?

Are dream contents physical?

phenomena neither physical, nor non-physical. Like a dream, not really a dream. Experienced my own body dissolving into rainbow light, it was a bit scary at first and I could feel the death process setting on, then Ganesh sat on my chest, held me down and turned into Rinpoche, repeated a mantra then disappeared and my physical constituents coagulated (sort of speak) again into physically felt peace and calm. It was quite astounding. Many, many other things have happened as well to show me the validity of the Jalus. This was just while laying in bed I had many other visions while in between waking and dreaming. Stuff like this happened many times for the first few years after my first transmission from Norbu in order to show me various direct insights about the tradition of Dzogchen that is both unique and beautiful. During a Jnana Dakini transmission, a female Buddha of the Dzogchen tradition: Making sense of Tantra: Berzin Archives. "Because the audience for Buddha's teachings consisted of a variety of beings, not only humans, some of them safeguarded material for later, more conducive times. For example, the half-human half-serpent nagas preserved The Prajnaparamita Sutras in their subterranean kingdom beneath a lake until the Indian master Nagarjuna came to retrieve them. Jnana Dakini, a supranormal female adept, kept The Vajrabhairava Tantra in Oddiyana until the Indian master Lalitavajra journeyed there on the advice of a pure vision of Manjushri. Moreover, both Indian and Tibetan masters hid scriptures for safekeeping in physical locations or implanted them as potentials in special disciples' minds. Later generations of masters uncovered them as treasure-texts (terma, gter-ma). Asanga, for example, buried Maitreya's Furthest Everlasting Continuum, and the Indian master Maitripa unearthed it many centuries later. Padmasambhava concealed innumerable tantra texts in Tibet, which subsequent Nyingma masters discovered in the recesses of temples or in their own minds." Anyway, I saw her in the room, my third eye filled with blissful light, she was just made of light and smiling, such bliss and wonder. It was very nice. Norbu said after the transmission that it's possible to see Jhana Dakini, as a confirmation of this experience. Sure, but it's more nuanced than that. Have you read Norbu's Kunjed Gyalpo? You only have an idea, but you don't know directly. Your lack of humility reveals that lineage can offer far more than you.

Yep. I know what you are talking about. (I sometimes get up to do something and when I start walking I have forgotten what I got up to do. Hehehe.) But seriously, I used to think as you do but because of some documentaries on TV regarding sleep and dreaming I have come to the conclusion that our brain is always active. It never sleeps even when we are sleeping. If it is active then there is thinking going on. All the time. But no, we are not always conscious of this thinking. I have said in the past that I rarely dream. The truth is that my dreams are rarely vivid enough for me to be conscious of them. Yes, right now we are playing with words. Hehehe. I know what you are referring to and I agree with you as to the basics of what you are saying. Now, logical (or illogical) thinking is a different horse. Yes, all that takes place in the conscious mind. Confucius being logical (his logic) and Lao Tzu being intuitional awareness. Now, there's nothing wrong with logical thought. However, illogical thought is not so good. But it is more fun to live intuitively.

OK, fine. Your manure smells better than my manure and you have more of it as well. But it is still manure. Because thinking that phenomena are physical is an error in judgement. Nope. That's not what I mean. There is nothing physical. For example, this computer I am typing on is a vision, a dream. It's not physical. It's not made of actual atoms. It's made of dream atoms. Etc. What have you seen exactly? Rigpa includes the physical in the same sense that rigpa includes marigpa. It also includes the physical in the same sense that rabbits include antlers, clouds include mushrooms and blind people include visions of rainbows. When people need help, they ask for it. If you go around offering help to those who don't want it, then it is you who needs help. Except I do have an idea about their attainments. I know what they have attained. This is why lineages are bad. Your behavior is proof positive that lineages offer no benefit.

I do not rely on beliefs. I have realized and directly seen this to be so (seeing is just seen, hearing is just heard). "Is" does not apply to awareness or subject. I do not mean there is something heard, but it is just the self-evident clarity of appearances that the label "awareness" refer to, like the word "weather", but there is no subjective self or inherency to "awareness". in seeing just the seen, means there is no seer, whereas "seen" too is simply a convention for self-luminous unlocatable d.o. And empty appearance/display like weather. To say "there is just a display" does not imply the display must be inherently there, it could simply a tv show, a dream, etc but that there is no agent seeing the display is true. First we realize "weather" is an empty name, doesn't refer to some permanent independent entity apart from that process of clouds, rain, lightning etc, then the next step we realize clouds, rain, lightning etc is also just as empty and ungraspable as "weather". Step one does not contradict step two, its like 1) there is no weather 2) weather is just a convention for appearances 3) appearances are empty Step 2 does not reify phenomena, step 3 does not reify subject. They are absolutely consistent and complements each other.

I think we are using awareness differently. I think you mean self-awareness. In dreams people are often aware of their dream, but not necessarily self-aware. I don't see a straight line cutting consciousness and awareness. It seems like awareness is more or less a gradient.

They did before the state of Israel was created there are many testimonies to this effect that I have seen on TV documentaries about the history of the Middle East. But I have to say you are right to be cynical. As I say, I like to dream nice dreams.

Ah well, I still like to dream that some people somewhere can have different views and yet co-exist and inspire each other. Maybe not in ancient China, maybe only in the distant future. But I am dreamer.

I had another short, but very vivid dream in which Sudhana and Manjushri appeared and introduced themselves to me. This is becoming very bizarre. I feel as if I'm being coaxed onto a particular path. Not forced or converted, but gently shown a way. A way with no answers, ever. Only more questions.

And what's your basis for this statement when you don't even know the next moment. How do you know anything if your knowing is like a dream. In fact, you can't claim to know anything. It's like, "Uh, I don't know, things just arise like dreams as part of universe." I think that's helpful to a certain degree but should not be seen as true. But it's experienced. And your explanation for this is, "I don't know. It must be magic because it's not really there." You were the one who brought up the point about non-sentient causes and conditions.

No substance whatsoever. Mind and matter are only conventions like the word 'weather' imputed upon a conglomerate of ungraspable/insubstantial phenomena. Consciousness does not only arise from itself. There is no one consciousness splitting into subjective experience. There are 6 (or 8) consciousness that dependently originates. You are implying there is a One Mind. This is substantial non-duality. Precisely. When you realize emptiness, you realize nothing is shared. You realize there is no mind, and no matter. All are just baseless appearances like a dream. Dogs see black flower. We see red rose. Quantum glasses (if such are invented) lets you see 99.999% void. You think matter is real and there are some characteristics to it, and that these characteristics are shared/universal. But matter is empty of intrinsic characteristics and utterly unestablished. We conventionally label matter as phenomena/appearances having the characteristics of solidity, liquidity, heat and motion (four elements) yet no substance whatsoever can be found. In reality the reason why we experience matter similarly is because humans have 'shared' (rather similar) karma, but this does not apply when we compare ourselves to other kinds of sentient beings. Mind and matter are mere conventions of appearances, ultimately non-arising. Rizenfenix (son who transcribed his father who is an old realized yogi probably a monk) says this best: http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/search?q=rizenfenix Colors, sounds, smells, flavors, and textures aren’t attributes that are inherent to the objective world, existing independently of our senses. The objects we perceive seem completely ‘external’ to us, but do they have intrinsic characteristics that define their true nature? What is the true nature of the world as it exists independently of ourselves? We have no way of knowing, because our only way of apprehending it is via our own mental process. So, according to Buddhism, a ‘world’ independent of any conceptual designation would make no sense to anyone. To take an example, what is a white object? Is it a wavelength, a ‘color temperature’, and or moving particles? Are those particles energy, mass, or what? None of those attributes are intrinsic to the object, they’re only the result of our particular ways of investigating it. Buddhist scriptures tell the story of two blind men who wanted to have explained to them what colors were? One of them was told that white was the color of snow. He took a handful of snow and concluded that white was ‘cold’. The other blind man was told white was the color of swans. He heard a swan flying overhead, and concluded that white went ‘swish swish’... The complete and correct recollection of the story aside, the point being the world cannot be determined by itself. If it was, we’d all perceive it in the same way. That’s not to deny reality as we observe it, nor to say that there’s no reality outside the mind, but simply that no ‘reality in itself’ exists. Phenomena only exist in dependence on other phenomena. I think you experienced no-mind but you have not realized anatta. You are implying there is One Mind expressing itself in multiplicity. This is substantial non-dualism. You need to contemplate this: In seeing always only the seen/seeing is the seen In hearing always only the heard/hearing is the heard Then you will break substance-view of consciousness and realize anatta.

Typing cannot be found. There is just appearance, which is not denied, but nothing can be asserted: including laptop, including typing. Everything is like an illusion, like a dream. Like a dream of typing, conventionally said to be so... yet it isn't really real. Find out where does the thought come from, where the thought is, where the thought goes to. Find the core or essence of that thought. You will see that it is magical appearance, like a magic show - appearing, yet not truly there or anywhere, without a place of origin, abidance, and subsidance. You will realize that there is no essence or substance or thingness of that appearance, that there is no-thing coming into being and no-thing to cease. There is nothing locatable about fire. It is utterly unlocatable and ungraspable. There is no fireness of a fire... therefore there is nothing undergoing arising, abiding and disappearance... just self-releasing traceless appearance.

It means that I'm trying to get the point across where one can understand that one's personal experiences of consciousness through unconscious (deep sleep) subconscious (dream sleep) and conscious living is already poised for the experience of Buddhahood, it's just flipping the state of non-recognition into recognition. Marigpa into Rigpa. Rigpa is... Dharmakaya Sambogakaya Nirmanakaya All experienced as a unity. I don't much care about the name of the thread, it doesn't effect me either way. No ralis, it confuses you, but not everyone. I'm sorry that it confuses you. Just go sit over there in your supreme non-conceptual state of awareness, you're so formless ralis, so brilliant, you cut through all my fanatical scholarly prose... oh ralis, if only I could touch the level of your awareness. Is that what you want from me ralis? For me to recognize how transcendent of my expressions you are? Should everyone recognize this as well? Is this what this 2+ years, nearly 3 years of shutting down our Buddhist discussion on this board which invites us to be here has been about? Ralis, your recognition of heart-mind is supreme!! It's beyond the scriptures and the discussions from various siddha masters! It's awesome man, I bow to it. It's funny how you think yourself to be beyond the many elaborations as expressed by Norbu. You should read his teachings more, not just public books.