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Post by figgles on Dec 11, 2015 18:28:24 GMT -5
If you want to go by the book(s) only then forget about his perceived 'arrogance', forget about what you 'think' awaits one at the end, such as your idea of "living with a sense of communion and Love".... forget about what anyone says, here or elsewhere and SEE THE MESSAGE. What I am speaking of here is experiential...not speculating about what I 'think' awaits. Have clearly seen, This is "It"...no more need based, emotional seeking for anything beyond 'this' moment. (I have told you this already though....) "The sense of Communion and Love" I'm speaking of, so much more than a mere idea. When the walls come down.... that's what remains...an actual sense that all that is appearing within experience, others included, arise from sameness. To feel so far apart from others, so disconnected from them that I felt I just could not engage them, would mean a preponderance of focus upon the surface differences, and a disregard of that fundamental sameness/Oneness. I read accounts like Jeds' and am absolutely perplexed over how one can believe that "tearing it all down"..."seeing that Oneness is fundamental", somehow leaves a sense of disconnect from others in it's wake. The visceral sense of separation that Jed describes where 'others' are concerned, is indicative of a wall that still needs to come down. How free really is one if he avoids engagement with 'most' others who appear to him? No, not seeking myself, but many who are still doing so, gravitate towards the McKenna books. He's feeding them a load of BS in his suggestion that post awakening, one feels so separate and distinct from others who appear in his reality, that he cannot even engage with them. What he is describing from that state of disconnection is an incomplete awakening...a stopping short and calling it 'done.' You can say that how one experiences others post awakening, has nothing at all to do with the message itself, but If the author of the books did not to some see degree see that as being somewhat relevant, why the heck is he even mentioning it? |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 11, 2015 19:11:00 GMT -5
OK. If you consider what Niz said, he was not effected whatsoever by the currents of life. (But no problem, I assume you haven't read Niz). SDP do you consider experiencing excruciating body pain from throat cancer as "not effected whatsoever" by the currents of life? Sorry, you are right. Pain is not fun. I was considering psychologically. (I broke my own rule, never make absolute statements.....well, I guess that should be, almost never make absolute statements...)... |
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Post by justlikeyou on Dec 11, 2015 19:42:13 GMT -5
SDP do you consider experiencing excruciating body pain from throat cancer as "not effected whatsoever" by the currents of life? Sorry, you are right. Pain is not fun. I was considering psychologically. (I broke my own rule, never make absolute statements.....well, I guess that should be, almost never make absolute statements...)... My personal experience with pain has shown me that the less it is given attention the less it is experienced. I was once in a late night emergency room with what turned out to be a severe case of MSRA infection 3 days after an umbilical hernia surgery. It was quite painful but while waiting to see the doctor I found myself between two other patients in the waiting room. One a wealthy guy and the other a penniless guy. They didn't know each other but both had just loss their significant others and were in mental distress about that as well as whatever physical issues brought them to the emergency room. Well, I found the situation interesting and I began to discuss and "counsel" both of them about loss, emotional pain and suffering etc. They were both very interested and hungry for what was offered. It became light hearted and frowns turned to smiles and light jokes. It was a wonderful discussion I enjoyed it until I was called in to see the admitting doc and had to said goodbye. Anyway, the thing is I noticed that during the entire conversation I had pretty much forgotten my own agony because my attention was on helping those two souls in the waiting room. So, I can see how a Niz can have painful cancer, suffer in body but remain not unfeeling, but rather somewhat detached from his own suffering, by putting his attention on other than his body. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 11, 2015 20:54:15 GMT -5
Sorry, you are right. Pain is not fun. I was considering psychologically. (I broke my own rule, never make absolute statements.....well, I guess that should be, almost never make absolute statements...)... My personal experience with pain has shown me that the less it is given attention the less it is experienced. I was once in a late night emergency room with what turned out to be a severe case of MSRA infection 3 days after an umbilical hernia surgery. It was quite painful but while waiting to see the doctor I found myself between two other patients in the waiting room. One a wealthy guy and the other a penniless guy. They didn't know each other but both had just loss their significant others and were in mental distress about that as well as whatever physical issues brought them to the emergency room. Well, I found the situation interesting and I began to discuss and "counsel" both of them about loss, emotional pain and suffering etc. They were both very interested and hungry for what was offered. It became light hearted and frowns turned to smiles and light jokes. It was a wonderful discussion I enjoyed it until I was called in to see the admitting doc and had to said goodbye. Anyway, the thing is I noticed that during the entire conversation I had pretty much forgotten my own agony because my attention was on helping those two souls in the waiting room. So, I can see how a Niz can have painful cancer, suffer in body but remain not unfeeling, but rather somewhat detached from his own suffering, by putting his attention on other than his body. Yes. |
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Post by figgles on Dec 11, 2015 22:05:35 GMT -5
Sorry, you are right. Pain is not fun. I was considering psychologically. (I broke my own rule, never make absolute statements.....well, I guess that should be, almost never make absolute statements...)... My personal experience with pain has shown me that the less it is given attention the less it is experienced. I was once in a late night emergency room with what turned out to be a severe case of MSRA infection 3 days after an umbilical hernia surgery. It was quite painful but while waiting to see the doctor I found myself between two other patients in the waiting room. One a wealthy guy and the other a penniless guy. They didn't know each other but both had just loss their significant others and were in mental distress about that as well as whatever physical issues brought them to the emergency room. Well, I found the situation interesting and I began to discuss and "counsel" both of them about loss, emotional pain and suffering etc. They were both very interested and hungry for what was offered. It became light hearted and frowns turned to smiles and light jokes. It was a wonderful discussion I enjoyed it until I was called in to see the admitting doc and had to said goodbye. Anyway, the thing is I noticed that during the entire conversation I had pretty much forgotten my own agony because my attention was on helping those two souls in the waiting room. So, I can see how a Niz can have painful cancer, suffer in body but remain not unfeeling, but rather somewhat detached from his own suffering, by putting his attention on other than his body. Wow...cool story JLY.  ...& perfectly demonstrates the point. |
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Post by laughter on Dec 11, 2015 23:23:46 GMT -5
No, he actually said the exact opposite. Niz: ....In my world it is always fine weather. ...My world is free of thoughts, for there are no desires to slave for. Q: Are there two worlds/ Niz: Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless. You can tell me what you like about your world--I shall listen carefully, even with interest, yet not for a moment shall I forget that your world is not, that you are dreaming. Q: What distinguishes your world from mine? Niz: My world has no characteristics by which it can be identified. You can say nothing about it. I am my world. My world is myself. It is complete and perfect. Every impression is erased, every experience--rejected. I need nothing, not even myself, for myself I cannot lose. ........Niz:...My world is real, while your world is made of dreams. Q: Yet you are talking. Niz: The talk is in your world. In mine--there is eternal silence. My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there. I Am That, pages 79,80. My emphasis. I would say Niz is saying he is beyond all his own past peeply conditioning. Can you take a step back and discern the futility of going back and forth with this kind of exchange? It turns us into nothing more than a pair of bible thumpers cross-quoting apparently contradictory verses to one another. This dialog you've put up is a common thread through what he said to peeps. Niz constantly pointed the seekers away from paying attention to either his or their appearance as people, because that was the false to be seen as the false. All conditioned attachments to the "I AM": === Q: The jnani -- is he the witness or the Supreme? M: He is the Supreme, of course, but he can also be viewed as the universal witness. Q: But he remains a person? M: When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases. Identity remains, but identity is not a person, it is inherent in the reality itself. The person has no being in itself; it is a reflection in the mind of the witness, the 'I am', which again is a mode of being. dialog #13 ============ But seeing the personal for what it is doesn't negate the person in the sense of erasing or obliterating it, as the personal isn't, in the sense of what Niz is pointing to, the opposite of impersonal. The conditioned body and mind are still there as remnants of the life lived and to be lived. The cessation of the person that Niz refers to isn't the end of personal experience. The shedding of the person isn't the shedding of all personal conditioning: =============== Q: You smoke? M: My body kept a few habits which may as well continue till it dies. There is no harm in them. dialog #54 Q: I see you sitting in your son's house waiting for lunch to be served. And I wonder whether the content of your consciousness is similar to mine, or partly different, or totally different. Are you hungry and thirsty as I am, waiting rather impatiently for the meals to be served, or are you in an altogether different state of mind? Maharaj: There is not much difference on the surface, but very much of it in depth. You know yourself only through the senses and the mind. You take yourself to be what they suggest; having no direct knowledge of yourself, you have mere ideas; all mediocre, second-hand, by hearsay. Whatever you think you are you take it to be true; the habit of imagining yourself perceivable and describable is very strong with you. I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food to be served on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it, I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached. dialog #57 Q: I see you living your life according to a pattern. You run a meditation class in the morning, lecture and have discussions regularly; twice daily there is worship (puja) and religious singing (bhajan) in the evening. You seem to adhere to the routine scrupulously. M: The worship and the singing are as I found them and I saw no reason to interfere. The general routine is according to the wishes of the people with whom I happen to live or who come to listen. They are working people, with many obligations and the timings are for their convenience. Some repetitive routine is inevitable. Even animals and plants have their time-tables. dialog #61 ============= You see, what Niz means by the "person" is something very simple, and doesn't refer to all body/mind conditioning, just to a very particular subset of it: ============ M: A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no such pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear -- how can there be a pattern? dialog #46 ============ So for Niz you see, his body and mind were something that he used rather than the other way around. He analogized his conditioned self once to a house that he could move in and out of freely: ============ M: A long as you are engrossed in the world, you are unable to know yourself: to know yourself, turn away your attention from the world and turn it within. Q: I cannot destroy the world. M: There is no need. Just understand that what you see is not what is. Appearances will dissolve on investigation and the underlying reality will come to the surface. You need not burn the house to get out of it. You just walk out. It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail. I move in and out of consciousness easily and naturally and therefore to me the world is a home, not a prison. dialog #92 ============ So you see he didn't advise seekers to tear down and discard all of their conditioning. Just, instead, to see the truth about the person. ============ M: Self-realisation is primarily the knowledge of one's conditioning and the awareness that the infinite variety of conditions depends on our infinite ability to be conditioned and to give rise to variety. To the conditioned mind the unconditioned appears as the totality as well as the absence of everything. Neither can be directly experienced, but this does not make it not-existent. dialog #39 ============ Stop trying to imagine what life was like for Niz, because what he's pointing to can't be imagined. He was always very clear on this point to the seekers: "go find out what I'm telling you for yourself". |
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Post by laughter on Dec 11, 2015 23:29:11 GMT -5
I don't see the contradiction with what sdp wrote. It's pretty rad. I don't either. But I was pointing to the fact that Niz smoked like a chimney yet said "I don't have the impression that I smoke" when anyone questioned him about it. I'm sure that got many a poor folk scratching their head.  Actually his responses to questions about it illustrated this none-to-subtle point that realizing the truth doesn't eradicate falsity, just illuminates it. |
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Post by laughter on Dec 11, 2015 23:36:14 GMT -5
Well...that's what we were talking about.....we were discussing the possibility of feeling 'special' with regards to the belief that 'most others are asleep and I am one of the few that are awake.' In response to my saying that 'the belief I am awake in world of mostly sleeping folks sets one up for feeling special', You said: Read more: spiritualteachers.proboards.com/thread/1902/jed-mckenna?page=25&scrollTo=304131#ixzz3tx8v2tK9The bolded, as I saw it, indicated feeling grateful in relation to 'being one of the few awakened in a sea of unawakened others.' Seems you are now saying it was not related? If so, What is it you are speaking about there? For what exactly do you feel "Immensely grateful"?
Not so. YOU were dicussing the possibility of feeling NOT special. But you can't see this is what you are doing. "Seems you are now saying it was not related?"
Not now, I never said anything otherwise. Can you please stop playing these games? There is no difference between a TR being and a not TR being, except Clarity and Knowing. The rest of the life will roll on as it has always done. In answer to your question.... I am immensely grateful to be alive and to experience this world. There isn't a day when I don't fall in love with it. Yes, that was clear the first time you expressed the gratitude. It took quite a bit of imagination and mirage to connect that feeling of gratitude with a sense of specialness. |
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Post by laughter on Dec 11, 2015 23:44:52 GMT -5
Yes! All talk of "The world" is rendered "bla-bla" when that is really grasped. it's always funny when people start arguing .. with themselves!  |
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Post by laughter on Dec 12, 2015 0:32:08 GMT -5
Niz: "I do not say that the same person is reborn. It dies and dies for good. But its memories remain and their desires and fears. They supply the energy for a new person. The real takes no part in it, but it makes it possible by giving it the light" Yes, exactly. This is the meaning of "Tom", D!ck" or "Harry" dies when the body dies, or shortly thereafter. ........ It's a very complicated issue, but Niz put it in a nutshell, my quote and your quote. ...........If one ponders these two quotes, a very great deal can be learned, but can't leave out any of the words of Niz, especially the words confused and confusion. 'dusty, this is the definitive word from Niz on personal reincarnation: Q: Yet, you must believe in having lived before. M: The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know myself as I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my experience. It is not that I do not remember. In fact there is nothing to remember. Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing. dialog #56 You gonna' stand corrected or stay stubborn?  |
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Post by justlikeyou on Dec 12, 2015 9:10:25 GMT -5
SDP do you consider experiencing excruciating body pain from throat cancer as "not effected whatsoever" by the currents of life? Yes. Physical pain is as real as it gets, and anyone who says otherwise is full of bs. He suffered from it like any other. It amazes me to see that people assign some otherworldly qualities, lifestyle, abilities to those who have torn off the veil. They did what all of us are doing: ate, slept, worked, f*^ked, admired nature, read books, interacted with others, loved, felt responsibility, wore silly or elegant closing, thought many thoughts, felt many feelings, travelled, sh*^tted... went about the usual business of living, being Life. Then they died. Like all of us will, and we have never heard from them since. After TR, especially when some reasonable time passed - TR people seem to become whimsical and playful. Nothing to fear and nothing to worry about, because it is past the 'I', the 'me', the 'us', even the 'we'. Yes, physical pain is as real as it gets, and as I said elsewhere, it can be mitigated but not escaped, depending upon where attention is placed. Placed outside the "meat suit" in service to others is one example of personal experience, and a first clue, I used where pain was almost forgotten/lost for a time in that service. Also, Niz claimed to have realized that his "body" was not the "meat suit" he wore at all, but rather was the Cosmos Itself...a Universal Body. Upon this realization he feared nothing and considered what ever was happening in/to the little "meat suit" he wore as less than a minor inconvenience. His attention therefore was on the Universal, and as such what was happening within his "meat suit" was only the tiniest, transient part of the Eternal Whole. The Realization of his cosmic nature is what I see as being behind his "ability" to suffer great pain with grace, and gave him ability, nearly to the day he died, to offer service to others in the finding for themselves that which he had found. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 12, 2015 10:58:30 GMT -5
Yes, exactly. This is the meaning of "Tom", D!ck" or "Harry" dies when the body dies, or shortly thereafter. ........ It's a very complicated issue, but Niz put it in a nutshell, my quote and your quote. ...........If one ponders these two quotes, a very great deal can be learned, but can't leave out any of the words of Niz, especially the words confused and confusion. 'dusty, this is the definitive word from Niz on personal reincarnation: Q: Yet, you must believe in having lived before. M: The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know myself as I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my experience. It is not that I do not remember. In fact there is nothing to remember. Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing. dialog #56 You gonna' stand corrected or stay stubborn? I have already said there is no reincarnating self. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 12, 2015 11:05:38 GMT -5
'dusty, this is the definitive word from Niz on personal reincarnation: Q: Yet, you must believe in having lived before. M: The scriptures say so, but I know nothing about it. I know myself as I am; as I appeared or will appear is not within my experience. It is not that I do not remember. In fact there is nothing to remember. Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing. dialog #56 You gonna' stand corrected or stay stubborn? SDP, do you really believe you will re-incarnate? No, REALLY REALLY? Again.... REALLY REALLY REALLY believe? Without a shadow of a doubt? No, I have never said sdp will reincarnate. I have said sdp will not reincarnate. I have said, what most people think themselves to be, thinking, feeling/emotions, bodily actions, is a false sense of self, aka ego/personality/cultural self/ mask/persona/imaginary I, dies when the physical body dies, or shortly afterwards. This has been my understanding for over 40 years. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Dec 12, 2015 11:24:08 GMT -5
Niz: ....In my world it is always fine weather. ...My world is free of thoughts, for there are no desires to slave for. Q: Are there two worlds/ Niz: Your world is transient, changeful. My world is perfect, changeless. You can tell me what you like about your world--I shall listen carefully, even with interest, yet not for a moment shall I forget that your world is not, that you are dreaming. Q: What distinguishes your world from mine? Niz: My world has no characteristics by which it can be identified. You can say nothing about it. I am my world. My world is myself. It is complete and perfect. Every impression is erased, every experience--rejected. I need nothing, not even myself, for myself I cannot lose. ........Niz:...My world is real, while your world is made of dreams. Q: Yet you are talking. Niz: The talk is in your world. In mine--there is eternal silence. My silence sings, my emptiness is full, I lack nothing. You cannot know my world until you are there. I Am That, pages 79,80. My emphasis. I would say Niz is saying he is beyond all his own past peeply conditioning. Can you take a step back and discern the futility of going back and forth with this kind of exchange? It turns us into nothing more than a pair of bible thumpers cross-quoting apparently contradictory verses to one another. This dialog you've put up is a common thread through what he said to peeps. Niz constantly pointed the seekers away from paying attention to either his or their appearance as people, because that was the false to be seen as the false. All conditioned attachments to the "I AM": === Q: The jnani -- is he the witness or the Supreme? M: He is the Supreme, of course, but he can also be viewed as the universal witness. Q: But he remains a person? M: When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases. Identity remains, but identity is not a person, it is inherent in the reality itself. The person has no being in itself; it is a reflection in the mind of the witness, the 'I am', which again is a mode of being. dialog #13 ============ But seeing the personal for what it is doesn't negate the person in the sense of erasing or obliterating it, as the personal isn't, in the sense of what Niz is pointing to, the opposite of impersonal. The conditioned body and mind are still there as remnants of the life lived and to be lived. The cessation of the person that Niz refers to isn't the end of personal experience. The shedding of the person isn't the shedding of all personal conditioning: =============== Q: You smoke? M: My body kept a few habits which may as well continue till it dies. There is no harm in them. dialog #54 Q: I see you sitting in your son's house waiting for lunch to be served. And I wonder whether the content of your consciousness is similar to mine, or partly different, or totally different. Are you hungry and thirsty as I am, waiting rather impatiently for the meals to be served, or are you in an altogether different state of mind? Maharaj: There is not much difference on the surface, but very much of it in depth. You know yourself only through the senses and the mind. You take yourself to be what they suggest; having no direct knowledge of yourself, you have mere ideas; all mediocre, second-hand, by hearsay. Whatever you think you are you take it to be true; the habit of imagining yourself perceivable and describable is very strong with you. I see as you see, hear as you hear, taste as you taste, eat as you eat. I also feel thirst and hunger and expect my food to be served on time. When starved or sick, my body and mind go weak. All this I perceive quite clearly, but somehow I am not in it, I feel myself as if floating over it, aloof and detached. dialog #57 Q: I see you living your life according to a pattern. You run a meditation class in the morning, lecture and have discussions regularly; twice daily there is worship (puja) and religious singing (bhajan) in the evening. You seem to adhere to the routine scrupulously. M: The worship and the singing are as I found them and I saw no reason to interfere. The general routine is according to the wishes of the people with whom I happen to live or who come to listen. They are working people, with many obligations and the timings are for their convenience. Some repetitive routine is inevitable. Even animals and plants have their time-tables. dialog #61 ============= You see, what Niz means by the "person" is something very simple, and doesn't refer to all body/mind conditioning, just to a very particular subset of it: ============ M: A person is a set pattern of desires and thoughts and resulting actions; there is no such pattern in my case. There is nothing I desire or fear -- how can there be a pattern? dialog #46 ============ So for Niz you see, his body and mind were something that he used rather than the other way around. He analogized his conditioned self once to a house that he could move in and out of freely: ============ M: A long as you are engrossed in the world, you are unable to know yourself: to know yourself, turn away your attention from the world and turn it within. Q: I cannot destroy the world. M: There is no need. Just understand that what you see is not what is. Appearances will dissolve on investigation and the underlying reality will come to the surface. You need not burn the house to get out of it. You just walk out. It is only when you cannot come and go freely that the house becomes a jail. I move in and out of consciousness easily and naturally and therefore to me the world is a home, not a prison. dialog #92 ============ So you see he didn't advise seekers to tear down and discard all of their conditioning. Just, instead, to see the truth about the person. ============ M: Self-realisation is primarily the knowledge of one's conditioning and the awareness that the infinite variety of conditions depends on our infinite ability to be conditioned and to give rise to variety. To the conditioned mind the unconditioned appears as the totality as well as the absence of everything. Neither can be directly experienced, but this does not make it not-existent. dialog #39 ============ Stop trying to imagine what life was like for Niz, because what he's pointing to can't be imagined. He was always very clear on this point to the seekers: "go find out what I'm telling you for yourself". Very nice quotes. What does it matter to you what I think? |
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Post by figgles on Dec 12, 2015 11:54:18 GMT -5
No, he is conveying HIS experience at the time and being honest about it. Yes. He is conveying his experience, but in his writing of the series and from the format and pov that they are written from, he has set himself up as an authority on awakening/TR/enlightenment...a spiritual teacher...and, imo, he has mistaken having had certain specific realizations for being 'done'...'cooked'.... You can verify the teacher status he's taken on yourself by simply looking at the regard with which you behold "Jed McKenna". The folks that resonate wholly and deeply with his book teachings, do so, imo, because their own walls are deeply anchored in the same areas as Jeds are. (heart/compassion/love) These teachings appeal to folks who would like to circumvent awakening of the heart in favor of a more 'heady' conceptual sort of "enlightenment." yes, that's evident. that's just it though, if emotional attachments is present and clear seeing is not, what we have are folks unable/unwilling to engage with those appearing in their experience as they are deemed to be "too different" and still insisting that they are fully awakened/enlightened. So long as emotional attachments exist along with an inability to see them, one is not fully awake. When Jed described his inability to engage with folks he deems to be asleep, what he is really describing is his own need based emotional attachments along with his inability to see that for what it is. It is one thing to be able to see and accept the fact that I feel disconnected from most others, but to look deeper is to see what gives rise to that sense of disconnect...it's always an idea we're adhering to that is behind such feelings. So, in your estimation, should Jed still be recommending these books to seekers? I would say if his seeing really has shifted as much as you believe it has, he really should not be....if he is no longer finding it difficult to engage with folks he deems to be sleeping, and/or there has been a shift in his experience regarding 'most people' due to this abilities to manifest a personal reality that is aligned with his preferences, wouldn't that be a pretty important bit to mention to the droves of seekers who look up to him? So... yo can say you have realised Truth and have realised your Self? Is that correct?[/quote] .....not the terminology I use...Forum discussion was actually the first real sniff I got of that kind of specific terminology (an inside job here...no teachers no books I can say "drove the final nail home" as you can say about Jed..have never relied upon any outside authority of that sort). ...& I quickly saw, The terms 'Truth ' and 'Self' while I will use them in these discussions for commonality of terminology, often carry way too much baggage. In my estimation, seeing "This is it" coupled with the seeing of the fundamental perfection of THIS, is about as close as words can get to accurately describing 'being awake.' |
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...& perfectly demonstrates the point.
