Zen Pig

I always go back to what some dead lama once said, "The world is real, but it's not really, really, really real", real and illusion are only words. find out by direct experience, then after a few years, with any luck you will learn to keep your yap shut because it is not something that you can explain even if you try, and most folks would think you were crazy. LOL. good luck

well, he is an old fart, and more importantly, he is very clear that he is in no way enlightened, that he is a work in progress, he has a great sense of humor, much like the Dalai Lama, who also laughs easily, and also is very clear that he is in no way enlightened. Maybe we should write BT and the Dalai Lama and tell them about all of the awakened and enlightened spiritual people on DB's, bet they have no idea of the deep spiritual knowledge they are missing! LOL

dude! I was just now listening to this BT rocks.

very nice, but what is your experience? what have you seen,? not trying to push you into a corner, but is this just a belief? which is ok, or have you had anything like this?

Synchronicity- was just pondering this on DB site. thought of writing something, but then went, "what the hell" most would respond with quotes from dead guru's, and state "this is the way it is because this guy said it, and I am believing it" . Nothing wrong with belief, if it is built from direct experience, and also remains flexible to growth or change. I try to speak from my own experiences, but get lots of blow back from writings, or statements from other sources that have nothing to do, with the writers experience. But what the hell, in the end, it always seems to pan out.

???????????? did you read my post? ok, good conversation. thanks

I don't argue with folks personal experiences, because that would be pointless. ( I am assuming you are speaking from your own experience) Kind of a rhetorical question, not only for you, but for me and everyone else who talks about spiritual unfolding. If a belief system is not a part of this, then why tell folks what a "fully awakened state" is like? for one thing, telling someone what a fully awakened state is like, is comparable to trying to tell someone what the color Orange looks like by trying to explain it by telling someone that it is a mix of red and yellow. While someone can understand the colors red and yellow, they would never be able to understand the color orange by trying to think of mixing these two colors. One has to experience orange directly, then they say, "Oh, yea, I get it, this is orange".......... Also, if this is your direct experience of "This state is beyond the mind or any of it's capabilities like recognition, understanding, etc" could be your experience, but might not be someone else's. For me, and that is all i can speak from. mind is not separate from anything else, nor is body, life, the earth, sleeping, awakening, dreaming. It is all this unfolding. but like I said, not enlightened so could just be full of shit.

hmmmmm. sounds like a theory. All I can talk from is my own, non-awakened, non-enlightened state. First of all, from what I have seen, sleep consciousness or awareness is not that special. Most folks who have a long term day to day meditation practice will start to have lucid dreams, and sometimes experience awareness in both deep sleep, the dream state, and many times, it happens that one can be both aware in deep sleep, or the dream state, and at the same time, aware of being physically in bed, all at the same time. So not sure what the article is talking about. sounds like a belief or idea, which is fine, but in the end we all have to have our direct experience. lastly, as far as my experience goes, I cannot "make" this deep sleep/waking awareness "happen" it happens or doesn't and my intent has little to do with it. Lucid dreams are a bit different, as they seem to be a kind of exercise in intent, but that is another story for another time.

one also has to factor in the odds of the moon being in the exact position to perfectly cover our sun so we can see a full eclipse.

for me, this is one of the reasons, that I focus on my hara/tanden doing classic focus meditation, along with what the west calls "mindfulness" at some point both merge, I can be focused on my center, and still aware of the whole shabang . very much like MA training when one is both focused on what is going on right in front of him'/her, and also focused on what is going on around him/her. it all merges. also, taking my walk in the hills is meditation, laying in bed at night is also meditation. I just don't use the excuse that I have heard from many neo-non-dual folks that "I meditate 24/7, because I don't need to go somewhere and sit for a couple of hours every day", which I suppose could be true, but a sitting practice is kind of laser focus like lifting weights or going for a run, it lets me go deeper, and hopefully I can take that in my daily life.

sounds like a good start. my only suggestion, is to not get in a hurry. meditation takes years and years of daily sitting. If one is in a hurry to get some where or change something, or experience something, then most will stop sitting in a couple of months. Just play, with a kind of attitude of letting go, and seeing what one will see, no matter what. to just walk the road without exceptions. good luck

yes. it's almost like everything and everyone is connected some how. LOL. I like to use the old term, "the web that has no weaver" to see the infinite connection to everything. interesting stuff. thanks for the post.

Very well said my friend. for me, fear is like darkness. I don't try to conquer darkness, but accept it as part of the dance. without darkness, (or fear) we would not know light, or love. yes I agree that fear is one of our greatest self made walls toward not seeing love. after all, once we embrace fear, (or darkness). we see that the fear is us, just like the love is us. it is a balance,

Not disagreeing, but I kind of got to call shenanigans on this one. While I also rationalize shit, I try to be self reflective and call myself if i am making an excuse for just blabbing crap . I have to just own stuff if I see that I am making shit up in order to make my life choice or "karma" (what ever that is), seem fit. I also, get the hairs on my balls tingling when someone talks about "the difference between survival and death", which, while it might not be wrong, seems a bit fear based. just my two cents.

Bingo! yes. (and I , being human, still get off talking about it, or talking down to it) go figure. life is grand.

No offense guys, but this is the medieval argument of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin"? question. we can pull shit out of our asses all day long, but in the end, until you or me are up against the wall of "now this shit is going down" it is all just jerking off. it might be fun, but it is not the real thing. LOL I remember the first time I got into a real knife fight with a guy that weighed close to 300 pounds, and had me up against a wall. all the shit I thought I could do went out the window. it's kind of like that. peace.

well....... you might, but both you and me, and everyone else right now, would not be here. What if the titanic did not sink? once again, you, me, your mom, dad, grandpa. grandma would have never been born. consider how you got to be here, everything had to be just right, mom and dad, had to be in the perfect time, at the exact moment, in the exact place to fuck in the old dodge ram and have you. your dog or cat would not be here. so shoot Hitler, and maybe someone else would have been in Germany in the 1930's to lead the world in another path, we cannot imagine. I for one, love seeing lessons in my life. Seeing the interconnection to everything, and stop whining about what could be.

yes, I have written about this in the past. I do think that many of these "bad guru's" might have started out with a real awakening experience or several, and started to teach with good intent. It seems to be human nature to let this kind of thing go to our heads, and we change due to the desire for power. I am sure the same thing would have happened to me, if I had chosen to walk down that road. like the old saying goes, "Man's got to know his limitations"

Then what creates Mind?

Not throwing stones in my own glass house here, but I see more and more how conditioned we are by our social upbringing. I have discussed this before in a charming story of how Robert Thurman's Tibetan teacher told him that he did not need to meditate so much because as a pre-programmed westerner, he could never drop his conditioned world view in order to become enlightened. bet that was a real knee slapper for him. I see so many spiritual seekers, and so called "awakened or enlightened" folks who still hold the boolean "all or nothing" , "yes or no", "real, or unreal, world views. If something is not real, like a dream, we call it Illusion, or that it really does not exist. If something is Real, (like my tv remote or smart phone) LOL, then we say that "this is real, material, we can all see it and discuss it". But when I was younger, and had dreams where I did not know I was dreaming, I could sit with a group of people at a table, and we agreed that we were all there, maybe eating food, that I could taste, feel, and that world was as "real" as this world, until I awoke, and saw that it was now, "unreal" or "Just a dream". So my mind was and is preconditioned to believe all or nothing, real/unreal, right/wrong. Can something be both real and unreal at the same time? do the terms "real, unreal" make any sense? for that matter, do the terms, "right/wrong", good/bad make sense as a mental label.? I have seen very bad people do good things, and vice versa. I have seen dreams that I "knew" were real at the time, but then upon awaking, "Knew" that they were unreal. Maybe just letting go of these ideas and beliefs, and just viewing the universe, life, everything as it unfolds without making a mental label for them. doubt we can let go completely, but maybe a little at a time. who knows?

actually i have an undergraduate in physical chemistry, and retired from our local state university about a year ago............. so I have no problem with science. scientific methodology is a process of asking "what is it that we can know"?? this originates from the ancient Greeks who also asked the question, "can we ever know something for sure" or epistemology. This is the very reason in western science we say something is a "theory" instead of a "scientific fact" which is something that media, and non scientific true believers say. The purpose of saying that something is a theory, goes back to the original idea or question, "can we really know anything for sure"...... so a theory says. "This is what we know so far from observation, and reproduction in a laboratory environment, so we think this is the way this process goes, unless we get additional information that contradicts our results" This is the way scientific methodology was designed to work. But now days, we get folks who might have taken a science class in junior high or high school, forgot most of it, but have a fundamentalist "true believer" faith in science. So if one does there due diligence and questions long held ideas, they are accused of being "unscientific" where the reality of scientific investigation is to question everything. The late great MIT philosophy professor Huston Smith coined the term, "scientism" or the religious belief in science.

Could be. I tend to agree in certain aspects of this comment. or maybe there is an "absolute subjective" truth. i personally think that a real "truth" would transcend both our subjective and objective scrutiny. but just my not knowing suggest that it might be deeper than we think it is

just an example of using symbolic logic in the day to day world. and also, the subjective understanding of a tautology. Also, the "idea derive from that logic that declares that one apple has to be equal to another apple" is a direct result of attempting to use a tautology in the real world, so it comes from the equivalence inherent in the tautology. I'm not saying an apple has to equal another apple, the tautology construct is. In the day to day world, symbolic logic is a very rough road map at best. Mostly I am saying that the idea of a "Objective" truth is questionable. (of course if I said that "there is no objective truth", then this would be a kind of Russell's Paradox, where by I would be stating an objective truth as proof that there was no objective truth) LOL

OK, this gets a bit weird, but a tautology is a logical truth, so to speak, like the statement A = A, which is intuitively true. by that, I mean if one takes the statement that A does not = A, that would be intuitively false. but if we look at these two statements, there is no real way to determine which statement is actually true or false. it is all a conditioned intuitively knowing, which is not objective. Lastly, If I say, A=A, which on the surface seems true, in the so called "real world", we cannot find any examples of this "truth". Such as replacing the symbolic A with an apple . so if i then say that Apple = Apple, while at first glance, seems to be an objective truth, is in fact not true, like we thought it was. after all, how can one apple ever equal another apple. one might be more red, one might taste a bit different, one might have a bruise on it........ and on and on. Even if one compares identical twins saying that Twin -= Twin, that also does not wash, as even identical twins have different finger prints. so in the day to day world, a tautology is just a subjective truth like everything else.

wow. yes, don't know how to respond to this. I am just a traveler, without a destination. so I have no idea if the road ends or goes on forever, maybe the monks are right, maybe not, maybe a little..