Mountains and Not Mountains

[Orion]

yea the expert is within and all that side-stepping clever stuff... but the help of an "expert" aka true guru is vital otherwise one can bake up a superiority cake (as you started out with) of ingredients from some kind of profound sounding, neo-nihilistic-quasi whatever demeaning variation like, "redundancy of my own human level of experience".

 

So you're saying everyone needs a guru in order to realize?

 

It's like saying that nobody knows what they're talking about unless they've read the right texts.

 

Are there many roads to realization? Please clarify.

 

The rest of the stuff you're saying is just projection. I'm not a nihilist.

[Orion]

Wouldn't a teaching that "it's all happening right here" also be a method of control?

 

"in reality, there is nothing to eliminate and nothing to establish" -- Hua Hu Ching.  Tr. Ni

 

Could you elaborate on your question? How is being present a method of control rather than a result of cultivation?

Edited September 18, 2016 by Orion

[Jetsun]

In terms of how to bring this into your human experience as far as I know it is just an inevitable part of the process, although I haven't gone through it yet myself to any significant degree Adyashanti describes it as the emptiness returning back to your human psyche to liberate all that is held in seperation, so after the transcendend awakening out of a person self there is an eventual decent of redemptive love into your humanity. So there is both an up and out and then also a down and in movement.

[dawei]

Could you elaborate on your question? How is being present a method of control rather than a result of cultivation?

 

You compared methods... and then stated your method.   This is the mind of duality.

 

As was said [somewhere]: to claim to abide by one ultimate path is to fail in understanding.  It is the mind claiming that path and thus it is not a path to anywhere except to please the mind.  The ultimate path is no [mental] path.   But to get there, is a mental path... 

[Orion]

In terms of how to bring this into your human experience as far as I know it is just an inevitable part of the process, although I haven't gone through it yet myself to any significant degree Adyashanti describes it as the emptiness returning back to your human psyche to liberate all that is held in seperation, so after the transcendend awakening out of a person self there is an eventual decent of redemptive love into your humanity. So there is both an up and out and then also a down and in movement.

 

I can relate to this, except I don't understand how love is an automatic manifestation because it implies a proscriptive destination. Is it possible to be enlightened but be beyond love? (A rhetorical question.)

 

A lot of people, such as Adyashanti, claim that such and such happens on the path. But who is to say? Who is to say what way energy should move when we reach certain states?

 

Do they really know or are they just manifesting their own egos?

[Rocky Lionmouth]

That's why I build 'em.

Well, that and their trade value...

Prime realestate right there on the beach, sustainable materials and easy remodeling!

[Orion]

You compared methods... and then stated your method.   This is the mind of duality.

 

Just stating an experience I was having, no rules intended.

 

We're all in duality. Thanks for the reminder.

[rene]

... But to get there, is a mental path...

Sometimes. Wu Dao. (-:

[Karl]

You can't stop thinking no, I have never claimed that, but to transcend identity with thinking just means your sense of "I" isn't being bounced around by your thoughts, another word for it is "liberation" which means liberation from being blown around by hope and fear. Or to get off the wheel or Samsara as Buddhists put it, or to stop living under the whims of a harsh dictator (the intellect) and restore it to its rightful position as a tool or servant. It is also to move towards truth or at least shed all that is false about what and who we are.

 

I guess the purpose of living more in truth is that you live more in harmony with the way things really are, rather than living in the way you imagine or think they should be. But ultimately there isn't a point or purpose because to transcend the mind is to transcend all concepts like purpose, there is just existence or what is.

"Existence presupposes identity and consciousness presupposes identification of existence".

 

The above sentence is what you are looking for in order to complete the equation you appear to be somewhat aware of.

 

The 'whims' of the intellect are a problem without any doubt what so ever, then if you change around some of the wording of your opening paragraph regarding the "I" being blown around, then couple "whim" with "irrational fears and doubts" and we arrive at mysticism and "wishing". The false "I" is then the crippled, irrational ego plagued with 'self doubt' and 'self fear' and in many 'self loathing'.

 

'Living in truth' plus 'living in harmony' is accepting reality and having a practical, reasoned approach to living ones life-rather than 'wishing' it were some other way ( another way of saying what you said 'imagine' or 'think').

 

The point isn't to 'transcend the mind' but to make the mind the finest tool devoid of irrationality, whims, wishes, crippling self doubt, self-fear and self loathing. To make fears and doubts become rational in tune with reality and therefore existence.

 

This is the closest I've seen you ever get to an acknowledgement of the role of the crippled ego, but without full awareness of what you are writing. As Rand said 'instead of where your wings should have grown is crippling self doubt'. It's a horrible thing and removing it requires one to be brave and not just brave for one time, or several times, but to be continuously brave. We must know how to restore the ego, the gain a full flowering (and IMO believe that this is what is referred to by the lotus flower) rather than kill the mind, it is to restore the mind to its full power instead of being held to flights of fantasy, irrational fears and doubts.

 

The first sentence I wrote is the cold scientific formula, but it isn't a way out if we don't know what the way out looks like. If we don't know what we should do because our mind plays a game of whim, fear, doubt, wishes, mysticism. However, it is incorrect to look at the mind as a dichotomy of that sort. There is no dichotomy and where there appears two, or even three, so those number become one when seen clearly. The dichotomy/ trichotomy ( in the case that others add mind) so that we have mind, body and soul. Three into one. Total integration, the end of self doubt, the end of imprisonment-'liberation' as you put it :-)

[Karl]

Adyashanti describes it as the emptiness returning back to your human psyche to liberate all that is held in seperation, so after the transcendend awakening out of a person self there is an eventual decent of redemptive love into your [own]humanity. So there is both an up and out and then also a down and in movement.

I added the square bracket to your text. This would be correct. However I don't like Adyahanti, or any of the gurus that make this thing into some mystic woo woo to make money selling books and course annoy me, but they are in a sense playing to the needs of the imaginary. Sometimes we need an imaginary sword to fight the imaginary dragon. However, I posit that the cure is far simpler, doesn't require and shouldn't require adding even more mysticism to our already over loaded plates.

[Karl]

I can't argue with you... use whatever structures feel right to you.

 

But calling what I'm saying BS reveals a superiority complex that is common on these boards. Instead of listening to experience, people like to assert that they know more than you, somehow.

 

Claiming expertise in order to make yourself the gatekeeper of knowing is just another form of control. The expert is within, no need to look without. We're all the same thing, are we not?

This can all be true. We all have to do whatever we have to do in order to get through it. If that means standing on ones head in a tub of baked beans or praying to the elephant God, no one can tell us it's wrong if no one can exactly point out what we should do instead. Everyone suggests that they have a magic key to our own personal hell, but that it is we who will not accept it, even when the magnanimous giver shows every sign of being stuck in their own particular hell.

 

I doubt anyone knows what any of us need. I certainly don't know how you get free. I know how I did it, but only vaguely on an event by event basis, but in such a way that I doubt it applicable to anyone else, nor help anyone else. It's like a sky full of a mass of fast moving clouds and the sequence is largely a mystery. How many books by Gurus did I read that I would now eschew as false, but perhaps still remain an essential part.

 

What I try to do here is to throw down some bread crumbs as to how it should look when one has truly found their own personal escape hatch, rather than how to find their hatch-which I think is near impossible anyway. Anyone who has tried to wean an alcoholic off drink will know that they themselves often become the scapegoat for the alcoholic to carry on drinking. We can end up a kind of cause in all kinds of personal tragedy in a kind of personal 'observer effect'.

[Jetsun]

...

 

No Karl what you write isn't what I'm looking for and we are quite far apart in perspective. Refining and improving the crippled ego is a fine thing but has absolutely nothing to do with liberation. But I fear that we have hijacked and filled this thread written from personal experience and awake space and filled it full of our own mind drivel, so I'm bowing out.

[Marblehead]

 Is it possible to be enlightened but be beyond love? (A rhetorical question.)

 

I will respond to it anyhow.

 

Yes.  But only if one is beyond both love and hate.  (This does not require not caring about others.)  (Nor dos it require a nihilistic mentality.)

[Jetsun]

I can relate to this, except I don't understand how love is an automatic manifestation because it implies a proscriptive destination. Is it possible to be enlightened but be beyond love? (A rhetorical question.)

 

A lot of people, such as Adyashanti, claim that such and such happens on the path. But who is to say? Who is to say what way energy should move when we reach certain states?

 

Do they really know or are they just manifesting their own egos?

I don't think you can be enlightened and beyond love, except love as a concept, rather you become love in the sense that you are that which isnt separate and you are that space or stillness which liberates seperation and thus suffering.

 

But in a sense there is a destination because this human life and the universe itself is moving in a way which is always deepening our awakening and putting pressure on that within us which still perceives itself to be in seperation, to be alive is to be in this state of continual refinement and continual awakening, which is a process of redemption or inpouring of love. You can't say exactly how this process is going to manifest for the individual or if they are going to resist it rather than let go but you can be confident of the general movement of it all. That is the way I see it anyway, it could be a manifestation of my ego.

Edited September 18, 2016 by Jetsun

[Marblehead]

That is the way I see it anyway, it could be a manifestation of my ego.

I do enjoy reading you in discussions such as this even though we have varying opinions and understandings.

 

Dualities:  Love/Hate

 

Two extremes.  The middle path is the Way of Tao.

[Karl]

No Karl what you write isn't what I'm looking for and we are quite far apart in perspective. Refining and improving the crippled ego is a fine thing but has absolutely nothing to do with liberation. But I fear that we have hijacked and filled this thread written from personal experience and awake space and filled it full of our own mind drivel, so I'm bowing out.

You don't know what you are looking for and if you found it you couldn't know it.

[blue eyed snake]

I am ironically accused of being too conceptual, if only I would just choose some concepts to work with. lol.

 

In a lot of ways these dead experts prevent us from seeing the naked truth. It's just replacing mind with more mind. Can we just talk about the experience of living without referencing various gods?

 

I'm describing an awareness, a sensation, an embodied feeling... not a concept. I'm just good at language association. I didn't choose the quote because I wanted to do the Buddha justice or paraphrase his ideology perfectly. I chose it because it evoked a certain concept coordinate for me that related to an awareness experience.

 

You are hanging in the wind. Yes, the power of choice lets you momentarily feel different ways about, but they are all temporary states in a greater free fall. Good news is, there's no bottom... sometimes you feel like you're flying and other times just falling.

 

These books, people, and concepts are reinforcement of the fear that we associate with feeling the free fall, IMO. They give a sense of order and control. But I don't want to mess with peoples self-created structures too much... I know how important those structures are, however temporary. So do what thou wilt, and that's all it comes down to anyway.

 

I'm attempting to come to terms with being this and not-this at the same time. Choosing a life when I am faced with the redundancy of my own human level experience.

 

Cannot help you, it's your path, but I do empathize, deeply.

also I suspect that, later on in your life, you will see it as yet another passing ' thing'

 

Sorta reminds me something my teacher once told me. Now I suspect that at the time he might have been at a similar 'point' where you are now.

 

His teacher said: "you should take up working with small kids" he was like " huh...

at the time he was a karateka winning prizes and further he was a working, had a good job, something with making computerized systems for educational institutes.

 

Now, many years later his favorite work is the teaching of karate to small kids, and listening to their  jokes. And for kids there is a special threedayworkshop during summerholiday, that is good for him 

 

of course he is also teaching taiji, medical qigong and i know not what, his workweek is about 60 hours. All with those dreary grownups, too full of their own minds... ( my words, not his, I know he sometimes is longing for a nice mountain to sit on and meditate, then he looks at us and stays   )

 

But his real joy lays with the kids

 

love BES

 

[Orion]

Cannot help you, it's your path, but I do empathize, deeply.

also I suspect that, later on in your life, you will see it as yet another passing ' thing'

 

Well, I'm not dead, so change is inevitable.