Nikolai1

I recognise the distinction and have often talked of it myself. But I am neither.

I cannot express in words what my Way is. When I do the math, the math is the truth and the only truth.

There comes a point in our intellectual development where rationalism and empricism are seen as the same thing. Or rather that we see that maths can be viewed either as the underlying structure of reality, or, as a language which we impose upon reality, shoehorning reality in the process. From such a perspective it becomes very important that the validity of Dreambliss's view is fully recognised - because all the prestigious thinkers tend to view maths as something very special and important, which it isn't. We use maths and find it useful in one moment; in the next we see that those who take it too seriously are on a dark and lost trajectory (one only has to read a thinker like Stephen Hawkings to see how he is lost in a dark morass of meaningless metaphysics. His interest in the Black Hole is itself, an interesting symbol of his own thought processes if he could only see that.) To take sides on the question of maths, is the error. We have to stand aloof, notice when it shall be useful...and then drop it like a hot potato when it is not. Maths is the truth of no-truth.

There is a common theory in transpersonal psychology that the Ground of Being is repressed (in the psychodynamic sense) early in life and the ego is constituted to take it's place. Awakening is a mattter of derepressing the Ground and allowing the ego to partake of its reality. So, it is thought, realization does undermine the life force as expressed egoically, but only in the service of a higher trasncendence. The stage of derepression is very painful to the ego and is called the Dark Night of the Soul. I have the classic text on this process if anyone would like it. It is frankly brilliant on describing and explaining the Drak Night experience. Just pm me your email.

When the dark night of the soul starts to disperse the peace may well set in before the higher return to purpose and action. You're not in a trap, but you are in a phase that will pass. I know you can bear it because it's not agonising for you - patience is the key word here. You are right to sense that this can't last.

Hi all, Even though special powers are recognised by all the major religions, so many of the world's most popular modern teachers show no sign of them whatsoever (eg Eckhart Tolle, Dalai Lama). Here are some common viewpoints: 1) Awakening is about gaining peace of mind. This peace will be even deeper when we drop our silly expectation that anything magical is going to happen. 2) Siddhis happen, but they are spiritually harmful and should not be discussed. Some teachers give the impression that they possess special powers but choose not to discuss it. 3) Siddhis may or not happen, but either way they are irrelevant. Speaking personally, I can understand how siddhis might be spiritually harmful but at the same time I consider they emergence as being a very clear sign of realisation. What do we all think? Have any of you experienced them for yourself, or have you seen extraordinary things demonstrated by others?

Because there findings weren't based on textual sources, or even archaeological evidence. They basically treat theat the myth or story as if it was a biological trait. So if they myth was found in two disparate cultures, they treated it as if it was a biological trait or behaviour and then 'traced' it back to the common ancestor in which in the putative trait first emerged. As in biology this requires us to go back many, many generations, they imagine it as the same with the myth. Like I said, it's a nice idea but highly, highly speculative and doesn't take ito account that a good potent myth can spread round the world, by word of mouth, like wildfire. The same timescales simply aren't required.

Their method was bogus. Nice idea but this research is bunk.

medieval

Hi Robin, Though none of this was deliberate, I started by staying very much within a western philosophical worldview, and always looked askance at those who started wearing robes, changing their name and chanting in ancient tongues. I always felt that truth is as open to me, an everyday 21st century Englishman, as it is to people from any other time and place. Therefore, why change? Pure truth was what I wanted, and I was skeptical of any system. Or I viewed any system as being just another metaphorical attempt at truth, no better or worse than any other. Now I can see that when we start to transcend the prejudice we all have of being an individual bound by laws of time and space, strange things can start to happen to us whether we deliberately aim for them or not. The dissonance you spoke of has therefore grown within me as experience has taught me more and more than there is more to this life than just the conventional western worldview. I've also seen that a lot of what gets called exotic and esoteric is actually more of the same convention and so can end of being a trap even for those who fearlessly sought it out to begin with! My main practice has been simple sitting meditation, and I never viewed it as any different from the mental prayer that we see in, say, the Catholic tradition. Best wishes from a fellow Devonian!

You never do know unfortunately. Of course you could console yourself by imagining that your deeper instincts are at play, but that would be just another rule. The bottom line is, our charity arises from us and you, despite your rules, will be exactly the same. Your neighbour knock on the door and needs to borrow sugar. We give it, don't we? (but perhaps they're diabetic???) Quite a silly statement. To be honest, I serve my children porridge each morning with a feeling of tired neutrality. I could only feel happiness in this scenario if for three days we'd been locked in by the flood and on the fourth we get to eat again. It's the same with our charity towards strangers. We give with a feeling of neutrality, and to be honest it feels cleanest when it is taken with neutrality...no mawkish gratitude.

It doesn't feel good to give. It feels totally neutral. If it feels good to give then it is clearly some kind of vanity which is very likely to be related to some kind of strategy of do-goodery. Well of course that's a philsophical question. Is there instinct? Or is everything at some level based on rational premises? Maybe if you analysed all the people I give money to you will find that they were all wwearing green because that's my favourite colour.

My path has been very intellectual so it has been all about 'seeing through' what so many others, most others, take to be indusputable facts. Whether in science, philosophy, medicine, psychology and therapy, I see how most people are transfixed by what are nothing more than superstitions. This isolates you, and the true thinker is a rather lonely person unable to go along with what the others go along with. But for other types of seekers, there can be a much greater consciousness of their own sinfulness. For another, they may discover skills or abilities that separate them from the mainstream and force them to develop a different worldview. There are so many different ways in which the spiritual path isolates us from the mainstream. My main point was: that once we have become aware of these things in ourselves there is no going back. These events have an authority over us, and we can't reverse what we have come to understand.

These are the kind of considerations that we leave behind. We are no longer blind to other's sufferings, but no longer attempting to heal all suffering (and thus creating a whole new set of evils). We see therefore that either interpration can be made about our moral action. This all-round vision allows us to act, and to then think no more of it. It becomes quite spontaneous. We walk past nine beggars and, for some reason, we give to the tenth. It just happens. Yes absolutely! And the problem with the 'do-gooder' is that they try to promote their own 'happiness and well-being' by giving to others. A strategy which of course needs, requires and wants people to be less fortunate than they...which does in fact fulfil itself as the needy become the dependent. I'm the first to oppose this professional dogoodery, but at the same time, there is such a thing as a hungry person...and that person needs nothing esle other than food. Therefore i do not go looking for people to enslave with my hep. but if a hungry person comes my way and I see their need is real, I shall give them my pound and think no more of it. I think we all do, even you..

As you mentioned beggars, there are two rules: 1) I always give money when I see a homeless person 2) I never give money to homeless people. Your argument is well-suited to those trapped in rule 1. Those who follow rule 2 are likely to have never fullt grasped their own role and involvement in the suffering of others.

The moral life is always lived in the present moment. It cannot be condified into a set of do's and donts, and therefore it can't be talked about with any specificity. But there will and does come times in our life when we recognise that another person's need exceeds our own. Therefore we deprive ourselves in favour of the other. This process becomes much smarter if we have passed though some of the reflections contained in the OP. We have to come to terms and accept our own role in the suffering of others. This opens our eyes, and shows us when it is incumbent for us to act altruistically and when not. Like I said, our moral duty does not occur in any known situations. The impulse to act altruistically arises spotaneusly in the moment and is self-validating.

I agree! But at the same time it's an insight that we cannot help but go through and come to terms with. And finding the ability to do this allows us to take the edge off our excesses. Those people who do most harm in this world are the ones with the least ability to understand what the OP is saying.

If I could sum up the hardships of the spiritual path it is the 'pain that comes when we become aware of something that we weren't previously aware of.' Once we see something, there is no going back. We can't voluntarily just forget it. We have to learn to live with full knowledge of this awful truth that so many around us are oblivious to. Most people don't stop to think about the moral repurcussions of their actions. They are unconscious of them. But we now cannot help but see that there are actual consequences to everything we do. The pound we spend on ourselves is a pound we might have spent on our children, or our friend, or our neighbour, or the starving Syrian. This truth presents itself very vividly and indisputably. We have to both remember this fact AND keep on living. I think in practice this results in a more balanced, moderate existence. We take what is our birth right as citizens of this planet, but no more than that. We are no longer forgetful or callous about the deprivations of others, but we are not paralysed by self-abnegation either.

Well I'll be going from Hanged Man to Death this summer!

I think a big insight is when you notice that even successful people are anxious and unhappy and that you have something they don't.

Hi all, Normal science is based on the assumption of correspondence. There is a reality out there, with its laws and its facts. We must gain some kind of representation of this world that corresponds to the way that it really is. The more our theories correspond, the better our knowledge will work and the more predictable the world will be. All this changes with awakening. No longer do we assume a world 'out there' separate from ourselves. We see that the world out there is indistinguishable from the world 'in here'. The mental and physical have blended into a whole, without seams. Our thoughts are a part of the total reality, and they condition material reality, and are conditioned, in a perpetual to and fro. No longer must we shape our theories on an external world; now our theories are understood to, themselves, shape the outer world. But our awakening, though a radical change in worldview, does not bring us omniscience. We still have thoughts, expectations and hopes about reality that seem to be erroneous. We get things wrong, misread situations, make bad decisions. In the past we had no problem with error. Error was simply the discovery that our representations did not correspond to reality, and the signal for us to adjust them accordingly. But what happens when we can no longer subscribe to this view of inner to outer discrepancy? How does our new science proceed? We now understand that our errors are based on a discrepancy that exists inside of us. We get things wrong because we entertain conflicting hopes, desires and expectations. These three types of mental events are all conditioning material reality. Our error comes when we expect a certain outcome that has already been precluded by the existence of a contradictory mental predictor. Therefore our science must begin all over again. We are in the position of Cro-Magnon man staring bewildered at a lawful world whose laws are obscure. But for us, all the data must be taken from the inside. We are the sole investigators, with exclusive access to the data. For ourselves we must analyse why our expectations did not come to pass, and what we did to prevent the truth from revealing itself to us in that moment. This process will purify us. We will learn to see which of our expectations are blocking other expections. And presented with this, we must make a choice which we keep and which we discard. We will stop squandering mental resources on outcomes that we now see we don't actually wish to happen. Like scientists we must apply Ockham's Razor. Our will shall become increasingly powerful and focussed. What we want will happen; and what happens is our will. This is omniscience. Not knowing everything all at once. But never finding yourself in a situation where you are confused by expectations that can not happen. Omniscience is possible - not through outer science, but from the self-knowledge that is now the urgent task for the recently awakened.

Hi Robin - I'm just near Totnes so we're practically neighbours!

I'm not denying by the way, that there is such a thing as matriarchal and partiarchal societies. Within these we have a dominant gender that holds all the social power, legal rights and there is a disenfranchised gender that is very disempowered. In the present day the clear examples of Patriarchal societies are those Islamic countries where men very much rule and have all the power. If there was a fear of the Feminine then these countries demonstrate it well. European society has not been patriarchal for many centuries. A matriarchal society is of course the opposite. In the west, societies are mildly matriarchal but veering towards a much stronger expression. This acceleration towards the matriarchal is made possible because of a benign delusion that we all hold, which is that our society is, like the Islamic countries, patriarchal. Both men and women are therefore activeley feminist and are seeking to place more power with the women, and imagine that there is some sort of deficit of female power. This delusion is the necessary context for any gender to become dominant. In order to unbalance the scales, we must imagine that the dominant are the submissive and so give more to them. This is a natural and healthy swing towards the feminine that our societies have not seen for millenia and I think the challlenge is to allow it to happen, while simultaneously seeing that women are not, in fact, disenfranchised. We must also allow power to pass into the hands of the women while not demonising men too excessively, as we seethe Islamic countries do to women.

I say this because you issue with your female acquaintance being mistreated by a male is such a specific,local example that its hard to see its relevance to this thread and can only derail it.

The term masculine pretty soon stops working when you imagine it applies to males more than it does females. Likewise the east does not stand for femininity and the west does not stand for masculinity. When you participate in these threads therefore try not to imagine yourself to be offering the feminine perspective just because you are female.