^ I should clarify that I am not just talking about earthly existance as most humans currently define it. I am saying there is so much more in the here and now to focus on without having to try to transend it. Shamans and others move in that level of earthly existance I think. A lot of that work they do with completely intact egos. Ego gets a bad reputation because most people dont have coherance within their consciousness..the ego is dominant and everything else is supressed.

A dominant ego is just going to dream shitty dreams much of the time. This is why our collective dream is being dreamed the way it is. That can change.

Its always funny how ego is such a tricky thing to talk about with others, because so many people have different ideas of what the term actually means in their heads. To some its sort of equated with a high level of pride and arrogance. Others see it as any sense of 'self' or 'i', or our story/familiar sense of self. Others -especially some of the more ancient texts imo- seem to mean basically just mean the left hemisphere. Or a mix of these and other things

I got you bro.

The ego is really just a computer of sorts. A tool for our conscious minds to use. We can change the programs it runs... swap out parts and upgrade it... even change the operating system, but its function still remains.

I have no animosity towards my ego. We are the best of friends.

The transcending ego aspect is only a feature of the early stage of the path. Even there it is not so much of a conflict as a training. You have to motivate your ego to help you by dangling carrots and the like. Once the ego is on the team and down with the mission, the dynamic changes completely. This is a transcendental moment, but it is only the beginning of the real work.

That's how I see it anyway.

Jamie, I also don't know any fully enlightened people, but I have certainly met people operating from a much more enlightened view than myself. The reason I have limited faith in enlightenment really comes down to a few experiences I've had that correlated pretty damn close with Buddhist/Yoga descriptions. I guess that because I'm reaching a point were my meditation is deep enough that I can indeed experience some of the Jhanic states described in Buddhism that it gives me faith that other things he said were true. While I am a LONG way from being free of my ego there is no denying that the less attached to it I am the more I just sort of flow with life. then a few weeks later I'll get trapped by my old deamon anger and knocked a few rungs down the enlightenment toten pole. Then I work to get myself out of the funk and less attached to myself and again I rise back up. I know this are sort of nebulas terms, but it's really is how I experience it.

I would never tell anyone to take anything of this stuff on faith. I'd tell them to do the exact thing Paramahansa Yogananda would.... Run the experiment for yourself and see. Of course this is no half hearted experiment, but because I do see many of the fruits on the lower branches it does give me <grasp> faith </gasp> that the other teachings are likely true as well.



In Buddhism there is a saying:
Before enlightenment: chopping wood carrying water.
After enlightenment: chopping wood carrying water.

I don't think enlightenment frees us from this world. In fact it sounds like there are levels of enlightenment were once actually can return back to this realm if you believe that sort of stuff, but then there are mor perfected stages of enlightenment... All of that stuff is kinda irrelevant to me. Honestly I'll be perfectly happy if I can just end suffereing for myself which is really the only claim of the Buddha.




Me to man. I would never downplay the human experience. Hell it's from this human experience that I am able to sit and speculate with fine people like your self about these sorts of things.



Just because there are no thoughts of me, mine, or I does not mean that there are no thoughts. It's our ego's that tell us we'd be vegetables without them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now I obviously haven't reached an egoless state (sober), but as I mentioned before there are times when I'm functioning at a much higher level...meaning much less attached to myself and life just opens up when I'm like this. Why could I not learn to take it further?

Lastly, I think we all put to much weight in our expectations of what enlightenment is. I for one don't believe that enlightened people can fly and perform other physics defying miracles? Why? because I have not seen it and it does not jive with the reality I have lived in. Why should I believe such things? However, I allow for the possibility that it could very well be so.




Honestly I think this will take you to the same basic place. You are seeking. Seek and ye shall find brother.




I love earth to, but make no mistake suffering will come to us all here. We love our lives in North America, but had we been born in other parts of the world life would not seem so rosy at all.

i also believe that is what it is



perhaps what you're saying is very true , yet it still does not say anything about the reality of the unreal

what i mean is thought is a thought and it is really a thought yet it is unreal since only in our heads , so real in one sense yet unreal in the other

just like the colour blue does not exist as the word blue is only a description of the sensation experienced by our eyes when viewing a certain spectrum of light , thus enlightenment is only a word or description of a certain state of mind experienced by some

my definition of it is very simple - no thinking , non-thought , to interrupt thought is easy a simple awareness excercise of even paying attention to breath is enough to destroy thought , yet this state of awareness cannot be kept up continuously

when the state of awareness is permanent and thought stops existing that is enlightenment i suppose ......i don't know whether this is possible yet from a few excerises i have understood it could be possible , even listening to music and paying attention is enough

enlightenment from one perspective can be viewed as when the musican becomes one with the music and endless tunes of harmony prevail



yes this is true the ego - the self does exist even after enligtenment i suppose yet the definition of what the self is gets totally changed , the ego (self) is just a name and charateristics , history , education and all that before perhaps such a state , yet enlightenment reveals that the self is pure awareness and not just the body he/she thinks itself to be

the musican is also the music , enlightenment reveals perhaps that we are not only our bodies , we are the experience itself , we are what we are experiencing aswell , the music we hear is us , the more we can pay attention to true awareness the greater we reside within our true being

when the ego (self) thinks itself just to be the body is still bound by its thoughts as it continuously keeps thinking about survival , mating , pleasure seeking , dominating or any other bulls , as this is totally valid considering the body needs these things , yet thinking is totally useless

as a great musican needs to be one with his music , he needs to create his music rather than think it , while playing any instrument as a few must have noticed one can surely play a piece written or one can when one is proficient enough , pick up a flute and let the music flow from withins one's soul .......that i suppose is enlightenment



exactly thats what its all about , being here ,present in the moment



exactly yet before enlightenment while chopping wood and carrying water , a person thinks too much rather than focusing on his work

after enlightenment its easier to be present and focus on work

a good example for those of you who have tried to Dj , in my younger years i was more into this just for fun , and while miixing tracks i always found it easier to accomplish my work by focusing on the music rather than my thought process , leads to greater work

in anykind of work i've noticed that being aware helps more than the thinking process , all kinds of errors can result from not being in the moment and focusing on work , especially in much more crictical fields of work

be one with the music ,



i am in the same boat considering i don't know anything either and what i do know in monkey terms i guess is not valuable enough , sure i speaculate and even put ideas out there sometimes as facts yet that is just my take on all this , fact , fiction or bull$#!~ i dont know , truth be told i don't know much and that much i know for sure

so just throwing ideas and such out there ,

^This works for me^

I was discussing this subject with a friend of mine last night and she said that discussing and thinking about spirituality at length is for single men with too much time on their hands. She said she doesn"t have the time for this sort of introspection due to looking after 3 kids etc etc. I gotta say i agree with her to an extent ( i am a single man with too much time on my hands).

I think unless you can make use of this spiritual experience to improve your environment and those around you, it is just recreational, self indulgence. I dont have a problem with that, it is just the way i see it.
I am also willing to address the question that spirituality maybe just an evolutionary process perhaps along with morality. Which species would be more likely to thrive out of 2 identical species with the only difference being that one was inherently spiritual and the other with no beliefs other that eat,shit,f-ck then die? Maybe the spiritual species would die out due to mooning about and wondering what it"s all about or maybe they would use their knowledge to thrive and help benefit the whole.
Once i have my hyperslap/godhead/ego-death experience i might see it differently but i see the ego as awarness and experiences reacting with the physical brain, sometimes resulting in spiritual experiences. And the psychedelic experience as entering the minutae of reality where concepts of time and space start to break down depending on dose, and the integration is down to the individual, depending what their ego tells them.
But i change my mind a lot.

Spirit=Spiritus=Breath... I am, frankly, astounded that no one has drawn the obvious parallel between Spirit and Prana. I waited to bring it to the forefront because I have gone on record as being a practitioner of Kriya Yoga and also, Chan/Seon/Zen Buddhist methods such as watching one's breath. Breathing is so vitally key to existence. For without it we would not exist physically. Our hearts would not beat and our minds would not think. I don't mean to get too literal about words... this thread has engendered some controversy about spoken labels, specificity of meaning or understanding and our preferred, particular names for things (or non-things for that matter). But I often wonder if the ancient Greek mystics used this one for a very, very, very specific reason.

And while I myself, do sincerely believe that whatever we choose to call that enigmatic aspect of universal being, Spirit, Atman, Anatman... is it not ultimately, That which sees through all of our eyes, DEEP DOWN INSIDE, is also the eternal witness to the mirage? It does not judge, it does not think, it does not reason, it does not dream. It simply exists. And when all else is thrown into the conceptual garbage bin, this alone remains intact. What then is it? Is it an awareness, as we understand awareness? What is it conscious of? I honestly don't know, for I am not able to simultaneously focus on this central point of Omni-awareness and treat it as an object of my attention, as I must be divided from it to see it subjectively.

Like Baba Ram Dass said so clearly, "You can't prove the existence of God or even describe God, but you can be it." Hence, the "Self" referred to by Self Realization, would reverse translate as Atman. And I cannot see arguing with Sri Ramana Maharshi, over semantics. Both he and IMO, his wisest student, Sri Papaji proposed the notion that there is no past, no future, nothing but the now. He is famous for his one-liner, "It never happened"

But somewhere in the tangle of all of these human ideas about the nature of reality... we gather our ideas in a basket and skip along down the Path, along the Great Way. One needs an ego to navigate one foot in front of the other and so,we lean to balance our immersions with our day-today existence as ordinary mortal beings. But this doesn't mean that the whole mind-shattering vision is left behind and we re-enter our worldly life and dismiss the peak experience. WE have begun to change the way we see everything. We approach each moment as an opportunity to open up a little more,each interaction a method for deeper understanding. And we become more and more keenly attuned to our breath.

But we have all been there, or rather, we are still HERE. We know that this is something profound but when in the mystical state, mystical trance, mystical eclipsing... or our transient ego willingly, consciously and intentionally joining through direct immersion, the everlasting insubstanciality... we are not exactly here anymore, as an I, possessing a fixed sentient belief system. Still, an awareness glances through our earth-born eyes and does not seem to be caught in the illusory realm of mind. I say "seem" because the I that watches through me, is still ego, and conscious-awareness does appears to I as limitlessness.

So, while I truly can appreciate the idea that Atman is eternal and indivisible. You know, the whole, "I am that I am", Deity trip. But we are stepping onto thin ice when we get too heady in our assessments. But I myself have always kinda felt both mind-sets were viable ways of piercing into a mystical state. And whether everything, including any Divinized traces of everlasting ego-soul-self, is a dream or not is existentially irrelevant. We have to experience Nirvana for ourselves, directly.

This discussion is beginning to remind me of a slim book I read in 1983, by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (son of Bahá'u'lláh, who founded the Bahá'í Faith in 19th century Persia [present day Iran]). An unusually devout man, he spent over 100+ pages trying to prove that Sufism is incorrect and Bahá'í is correct. He was responding to statements by Pir O'-Murshid Hazarat Inayat Khan (head of the Sufi Order in the West).

I won't bore you all with the details of the booklet but he felt that proclaiming that Allah is 100% present within all states and stages of apparent reality was not really true. He believed immanence was a fallacy and a delusional lie. That only through complete transcendence of the mortal paradigm, can mankind know God directly. Silly debate, really. If truth is really truth, it would apply to all aspects of being and non-being (inclusive). Not just be a partial truth, as the notion that nothing material, mental or substantial is even an authentic experience. Should not THE TRUTH, which must equally exists within every single paradigm of the All-in-All? Even the allegory I earlier raised about the infinite stack of pan cakes, each of reality unit itself, towering taller than any man-made skyscraper. I suspect that the living and breathing, yet sequentially undying, Spirit... is flowing throughout all levels and planes of this dreamscape of our co-creation, equally and playfully.

Reminds me of a verse from a great song by the 1970s British progressive rock band, Yes. It 's within only of the choruses from the tune Fragile:

"To Look around, to look around. Yes, He is here; Yes, He is here."

Perhaps this is also a way of saying, "All is One"? So, when we say, ALL... the material plane is also The One and therefore, most Sacred. Thought on this idea? Can an unadulterated awareness be maintained while tip toeing down the road of sentient, sequential life? And since awareness always exists on it's own terms, the notion of an everlasting Soul or everlasting awareness within (whatever you want to name it), is Soul then impermanent? Yes and no, I suppose.

Atman exists beyond ego because it is the filmiest of membranes from the Clear Light of the Void. And so are we, in our core essence, light. But also, what illusion is not wholly of Divine Mind, as God is becoming everything and every possibility, immanent and equally transcendent to any permanency of form. The trail is in the freely flowing play of consciousness. the flow of one's breath. The flow reveals the presence and all is interlinked seamlessly to the current. It's all the same force, it exists here on earth and it's all a singularity of being, despite the appearances of multiplicity. All is surely One.

Any thoughts, comments or rebuttals on these musings?

Rising Spirit this was a great post. I resonate with a lot of this.



I alluded to something similar earlier.

I need a heart to live. Therefore the heart is part of me.
I need a brain to live. Therefore the brain is part of me.
I need concentrated air to live. Therefore the air is part of me.
I need a biosystem to concentrate the air. Therefore the biosphere is part of me.
...
...
...
I need the entire universe in order to to live. Therefore the entire universe is a part of me.

If I am everything. Then so is everyone else.
If everyone else is everything then there is no individual self!

If there is one thing I am wholly certain of it's that the teachings of atman and anatman are two sides of the same coin. Different teachings required to jar different ego's into new views. The centuries of arguing between Vedanta and Buddhism is just retarded. They are headed to the same place yet arguing about semantics.

Rising Spirit I think your signature line accurately describes this.



It is a pleasure and an honor to have found people such as you that will engage in such deep converstations. Alas I often try to engage my facebook frieds and only a few respond. At the nexus though everyone responds and they respond with yeah cool, but have you thought of it from this angle? That's why I love you guys.




I really need to spend more time reading about the Bahá'í faith. I know little, but I have to say I don't agree that Allah is not 100% present in all things. But then most abrahamic religions still think in terms of God outside the universe.

Peace

Well, the Bahá'í faith is really no different than any other monotheistic religion. A new interpretation of Torah, Biblical and Koranic polarities. They are not a non-dual school of esotericism. It was kind of a reformist, neo-monotheistsm which sprouted as a reaction the the blasphemy of the Sufis, who believed in the "Substantiation of Allah" as the Spirit hidden within this earthly garden. The HU vibration is everywhere, as is Prana. You see this beautiful sentiment echoed in the Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. Sufis are lovers. They are in love with life BECAUSE Allah is everywhere, always was, always will be. Like the Tao, the quintessence is never absent from the relative phenomena of life on planet earth, rather, it dances inside of all movements of the universal manifestation. It's like saying that the individual facets of the jewel of God, The Unified field of Being, are the same as the whole of the Field.


William was a cool guy. Thus it follows that, "He is Here.", all is one. Yada, yada, yada...

One of the paradoxes which most fascinates me is that until one has the direct mystical experience and transcends one's ego, moving through ego-death, one is unable to see the Divine in Divine terms. As oneself, as all others, as no-thing at all. All things in the unified totality, itself ever present, forevermore. Allah resides as our awareness observing the universal drama, as our conscious-awareness blooming in effulgent splendor. Consciousness resides freely within the relative play of physical existence, we all share it's buzz. So, we go way deep within, we ascends to immeasurable heights beyond self and then, we touch the ground as being equally Sacred, as well. The Light shines on all things under heaven, eh? Surely, it's all about integration, internal AND external cultivation and the balance.

It's is a journey if we see it that way but it is also a dance. When we dance, there is no destination, there is only the joy of the moment. Moving is rhythm to the cosmic flow, as it's current freely passes through our form and all other forms. Blending into the interwoven fabric of the web of Omni-consciousness. It's good to think about stuff... but it's also good to feel the groove and shake it like a hot tamale! Shiva kicking up his heels, as Nataraja, dancing eternally in every heart, beating in every sentient life-form.

The Sufi sees Allah as being BOTH transcendent and immanent (and not different). Whereas, Bahá'u'lláh saw the world as false, transient, illusory and a trap for the indwelling soul. His Heaven was not HERE, it was only in the highest planes of Divine Mind. Like with the Rhadasoami/Sant Mat lineage, we are encouraged to see the material plane as an impediment to realizing the Sacred Vision. Not my cup of tea and I weigh-in with the Sufis on this belief. And it's important to mention that the Sufis practice many forms of breathing, inner light and sound meditations, and often to extremes.

They also whirl ecstatically, as we see with the dance of the whirling dervishes. Spinning like tops for ridiculous amounts of time. I used to practice this gracefully spinning dance. At the most, for maybe 15-20 minutes until I'd fall down, so dizzy I couldn't recognize anything around me. Man, talk about an altered state of consciousness! Yet, Pir Valayet Khan would spin for 1/2 an hour with a beautiful expression of inner peace upon his face. He would end the dance calmly and have no dizziness at all. A sweetheart of a man, I do miss his gentle fire.

Man, you are my new best friend..

Nice to know that you are a DJ. As a fellow DJ, musician, producer I relate hardcore to your entire post. Way to go.

I almost feel like putting your lines above to music.

I second this and I'd gladly play role of bass player or guitar player for the sound track.

An interesting note is that the German word for breath is ATEM.

Many people have made the case for connections between German speaking and Sanskrit speaking cultures back in the day. (Aryans from the Caucasus above Iran were supposed ancestors of both groups) You have probably heard of the Indo-European language group...

Always a pleasure to wade into your verse. I sip it slowly like a fine wine.

In Islam, the word for Spirit is Ruh, which means breath.

It was breathed from God, literally in the quran: the Light of the heavens & earth; the usage of Light being entirely literal and physical light as much as transcendental - breathed into first man (signified as Adam, scientifically it could only be Y-chromosomal Adam) and spreads through the seed therefro,.

Well, consider how life originated or appears to have. A constant trial and error. Fail after fail after fail.

But at some point, we struck gold. We managed to loop the life-force/momentum onto itself, and it struck out a sound like a giant gong, it saw itself.


Like optical tweezers. Optical tweezers are an assembly of laser beams, that can manipulate individual particles through space. By shining a laser at a particle from every single direction simultaneously, then gently nudging it around by amplifying the field at a certain angle.


The breath flow which ran through every living creature finally found itself in primordial man whose complex neural circuitry optically tweezed itself, finally SAW itself, thus SKY-NET became aware.


Through the tools of information theory we can actually assign a physical mass to a thought:



Now tell me... how light is 4.43197 bits? I'd say... pretty light. To move around masses like that with finesse, you'd need some kind of tool. A tool, such as an assembly of optical tweezers

That's quite fascinating. Alternately, the ancient Egyptian term for the effulgence of the sun was Aten, during Akhenaten's brief reign. The misnomer is that they were worshiping the physical sun as a god, that gaseous giant in the center of our solar system. In fact, they saw the orb/disc of the sun as a vehicle for the Divine Light, which was itself, the only true God. One might even see this as being the Spirit within the luminosity of the material sun (or moon or other stars, for that matter).

If one accepts the premise that Zarathustra lived prior to the traditional date of approximately 600 BCE, and really existed in the 2nd millennium BCE. As there is much evidence to place the time period of the Gathas, simultaneous with the Rig Vedas.

This places Zarathustra's theology of God as the Light (within the sun & within fire), just prior to Akhenaten's time period. It is noteworthy that the ancient Greek philosophers believed "Zōroastrēs" had lived long before their own historical era. Following through with this line of though, it has been suggested that Pharaoh Akhenaten was exposed to the ideas of Zoroastrianism, by way of Nefertiti and her mother, themselves natives of Mittani.

It then follows, that Aten is Egypt's cultural reflection of Ahura Mazda (Light & Wisdom) and the symbol of the sun-disc, Aten was a refined & simplified symbol of the Faravahar, the winged sun disc. Centuries later, it shows itself again in the Sufi symbol, Tughra Inayati, the winged heart (the heart responsive to the Light of Allah is liberated).


I like how there is this beautiful interrelationship between Spirit, breath and the Light of lights. One of my favorite meditations is breathing the Inner Light. One breathes not just with one's lungs, as with pranayama, breathing the spiritual essence residing within the air, rather, with co-ordination & synergy with the portal of the Ajna (3rd Eye).

By drawing the light into the mind we are then able to exponentially expand it's radiance, consciously and so, trigger the Sahasrara, the crown chakra, into full bloom. So, the lungs and the pineal gland work in synchronicity. And by using the effulgence as a catalyst to shift into the non-dual state, as the eclipsing stops the mind just long enough to segue into an unthinking, non-linear mode of experience.

And just as the material rays of sunlight, chariots the essence of the Light itself, the act of breath chariots the insubstantial Spirit, the vital Prana which is freely flowing everywhere, as Spirit nourishing all life through the miracle of breathing.


I am intrigued by your term Sky-Net. the Spirit in the Sky? The Universal Web? The Grid? The blooming Chrysanthemum, channeled through the conscious-awareness of human peak experiences? Please elucidate further, embracethevoid.

Breath, I feel, is very important. During many of my stronger experiences with aya, mushrooms, etc I could always some-what control/mediate the experience with the proper breathing, when it'd start to go south. In many of my ayahuasca experiences I was told to 'keep focused on my breath, for that is your lifeline'.Breath is the totality of life. Everything in life is a movement of that Cosmic Breath. There is no faculty within our bodies that does not rely on breath.

As from the Rig Veda in the Hymn of Creation (10:129:2) it says: “That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature.”

Indeed.

This theme runs through all of the great old traditions and is encoded into most of the modern languages to boot.

Interesting about the Zoroastrian / Akhenaten connection. I don't think I knew about the Nefertiti being from Mitanni bit. I assume that Mitanni is the Ancient Egyptian designation for Persia?

As for Sky-Net, you might recall it from the Terminator backstory. Though, I am sure the reference here is indeed alluding to the cosmic tapestry as well...

Chi = Breath | Prana = Breath | Ruh = Breath | Ruach = Breath (Hebrew) | Spirit = Breath etc.

And in every case, these words mean spirit or energy as well. Most creation myths involve breathing the breath of life into an inanimate man. Even Orgone and other takes on the idea are associated with breath. Pretty universal.

Though, y'all... I do think we have left the OP and theme of the thread behind now. As long as this one is already, and with AKL MIA... perhaps we should start a new thread on this theme.

Just a thought.
HF

Sky-Net?

or

Indra's Net?

Indra's Net is indeed the Sky-Net to which I refer


The Grid, it is a very real grid. Even when you are not on psychedelics, it is always present and pulsating unto itself.

Practicing moving your body in alignment with the Grid is the essence of being in line with the Tao. The Grid embodies the paths of least resistance of motion, the most energetically efficient flows. Moving aligned with the Grid, we get the experience of the infinite richness of life and its design and its contents. There is infinite richness in a simple sheet of paper but if we are not looking, all we see is a mere sheet of paper.


I'd like to present this video, I believe it jives with the whole thread:



Watching this video is like being on Ayahuasca, no word of a lie. These are the visuals of 2013 and they have become exceedingly capable of rendering the psychedelic vision into film. I am not lying when I say this: watching this video is literally like being on Ayahuasca. Some of the visuals seem to massage my neurons and bring me into a hyperspace headspace while they are on screen. Profound and deep, if you have the time, watch it. It's all about Indra's Net and how it embeds itself in the fabric and harmony of existence.

Psychedelics may not directly facilitate spiritual progress on their own but they do have a way of doing it indirectly. I'll explain, when a child is born it is completely innocent and void of knowledge. It doesn't have an ego, its wants and needs are very instinctual. As the child gets older and the brain starts to develop its personality starts to become more apparent. It's sense of self is born. But with this sense of self the ego is also created. Intuition is many times lost at a young age to give over to a more analytical way of processing information and formulating an understanding of the world they live in. Once it goes to school the social conditioning truly begins. Through the social conditioning the ego becomes fully developed.

True spiritual progress and enlightenment begins when ones shed themselves of their social conditioning, overcomes their ego, and learns how to use their intuition once more. Enlightenment cant be understood through analytical processes only one's intuition. Any drug that forces someone to perceive things in a way they never have will opens someone's mind to things they have never considered before. It is only natural.

maybe they just do whatever they are gunna do to you?

Humans tend to complicate everything.