Well, it's my understanding that Crazed is right. There are very few people in this world capable of achieving the mental discipline needed for Vipassana meditation (which is necessary for attaining Enlightenment, because it allows you to deeply contemplate the nature of suffering). This means, if you don't first desire Enlightenment, you probably aren't going to get there, as I'm sure the vast majority of people who achieve single-point concentration are the ones who would like to be Enlightened. That being said, Enlightenment is not the thing that is to be desired, rather, the end of suffering is. I should think that the end of suffering is the ultimate goal (as that was the chief reason why the Buddha taught of and found Enlightenment, is that not correct?), and that an ego will always have desire until it is Enlightened. I understand the ego as, not entirely absent once Enlightenment has occurred, but rather, merged with nothingness, and thus is an "empty shell." It still exists (no human with a human perspective could exist without an ego, as the ego IS the human perspective), but the ego is lacking in all things that one would consider the ego. Now, the ego is full of wisdom, and is capable of understanding without perspective. The ego no longer suffers or feels joy, the ego merely exists, sort of like an outline with no substance to fill it. It no longer desires, or clings, or abhors, it is in a sense absent of all imperfection. Does anyone agree with this idea?
hikaru, i get so much joy out of your posts and loving seriousness. i don't know about your use of the term ego, after enlightenment. i'm interested in others' opinions on this. my understanding is that the ego itself the illusion, like the border between you and i. therefore, upon enlightenment, the ego doesn't remain like an empty shell; it just doesn't remain at all. what is experiencing? one does not experience joy, as that would imply an ego remaining to experience it, but one is joy-ing. no ego, no doer, just the deed, right? s.
The question is still valid: if Enlightenment means the death of the ego, why would the ego desire it? It can't. The very desire to be Enlightened will keep one from becoming Enlightened. Yes, we desire Enlightenment, but when presented with the actual possibility the ego will most likely recoil (as it did in my case.) As far as "single pointed concentration," I prefer to be "open" and not "concentrated"; I prefer the way of Tantra instead of Yoga. I basically want to ignore the mind, not make it stronger. The ego cannot be full of wisdom. As I understand (???) Enlightenement, the mind fractures into two, the witnessing mind and the thinking mind; one can actually see the thinking mind think, so one can ignore it, and in ignoring it, it shuts up. I have only been able to witness the thinking process as separate from myself, I have not witnessed it shutting up, it just keeps thinking but I choose to ignore it, like driving past a city on the freeway, watching the thinking process veer off into the right.
white feather, that is fascinating; i have never heard of anything like this splitting of the mind before. other writings seem to point to something different and much more indescribable. are there different levels, then, of liberation? what you have been able to witness in yourself inspires me to awe. from the mandukya upanishad, the basic reality is, "that which is conscious neither of the subjective nor the objective, nor of both; which is neither simple consciousness, nor undifferentiated sentience, nor mere darkness. it is unseen, without relations, incomprehensible, uninferable, and undescribable - the essence of self-consciousness, the ending of maya." i imagine the buddha to be such an encompassing and unspeakable state, there is no mind-looking-at-mind, and nothing at all that could be illustrated, no duality, non-duality, and not at present or at any time. love,
Why, thank you! You have a lot of interesting posts yourself. Cheers! See, that's kind of what I mean. I do realize that from a Buddhist standpoint, the ego is the illusion, but ... it's there, whether as an illusion or as something arguably real, regardless. Does it not seem that once a state of Enlightenment is obtained, the illusion of self is still there, but one now has wisdom enough to see through the illusion and render it useless? By that same token, does it also not seem that one still has an ego, they merely have transcended it and it does nothing (hence it is like an empty shell, much like an fake wall that you can now see through even though it's still there). Does that not seem right? Darrell Kitchen, I wouldn't mind your comments. Is it really the DEATH of the ego, does the ego disappear completely, or is it rather the debunking of the illusion that the ego is "self?" I'd argue that ego is a result of the chemical makeup of our bodies, so unless those chemicals change, does the ego not still exist (it just is rendered useless)? In that sense, one can desire to remove illusion and suffering. As I understand it, it's transenscion (sp?) of the ego, not the death of it. We all have our own methods. I've been reading up on Vipassana meditation, which is apparently the meditation that Sidhartha Gautama used as he sat under the Bodhi tree when he became fully Enlightened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassana I think you should check it out, it's neat. =) This I'm not so sure how to respond to, because it raises the question ... if the ego is an illusion, how can it be full of wisdom? And at the same time ... Nirvana can (supposedly) be only achieved through being full of wisdom and defeating ignorance ... yet are not wisdom and ignorance constructs of the ego, constructs of the self? That is much like what I imagine Enlightenment as, a state of no volition, no desire. I agree with White Feather in that such a person becomes oriented in a present-dwelling witnessing mind, but I think the details of the thinking mind are fuzzy at best. I argue that, once Enlightenment is attained, we still think, yet we don't will. Because of this, are actions are always skillful reactions, and never unwholesome.
That is a good question. If one is to substitute the word "freedom" instead of "liberation", what would you say? If one is free, one is free? Even freedom within a Buddhist context can be seen as slavery. Supposedly, the last illusion of the mind is to have it think that it is Enlightened. The plain fact is that "reality," "the Truth" cannot be said. When people ask me to describe Truth, I ask them to describe to be what an orgasm is. Can some do it better than others? (I think that they can. But the questioner cannot know for certain.) So, many say that it is like Orgasmic Bliss. But, supposedly, one must even go beyond Bliss. I don't know.
To Hikaru " hikaru, i get so much joy out of your posts and loving seriousness. Why, thank you! You have a lot of interesting posts yourself. Cheers!" Hey friend! Hmmm, love isn't serious, LOVE IS LIGHT and FILLED with laughter... Serious people scare me... Hitler was serious! seriousness is the problem of the world, one of the BIGGEST PROBLEMS... In the Seva foundation where they help blind people, if anybody uses the words serious, they have to put on the serious glasses, which looks like marx brothers glasses... Now that is an organization that gets the cosmic joke Lighten up guys! The Buddha is one of the biggest jokers of them all! Everything he said was a cosmic joke, designed to induce laughter and lightness not induce heaviness and seriousness which are the evils in the world. Here is some thoughts about how Alan Watts see buddhist cosmic humor relatng to realizing the one conciousness... he calls it a trick... why because he is seeing the way the Buddha is playing with US, to him the universe is play, leela... He can't help it, he has realized essential nature. It is IMPOSSIBLE for him to take it serious and heavy. " Now this is the Buddhist trick: the buddha said "We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won't suffer." But he didn't say that as the last word; he said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they're going to come back after a while and say "Yes, but now I'm desiring not to desire." So the buddha will answer, "Well at last you're beginning to understand the point." Because you can't give up desire. Why would you try to do that? It's already desire. In the same way you say "You ought to be unselfish" or to give up you ego. Let go, relax. Why do you want to do that? Just because it's another way of beating the game, isn't it? The moment you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one up on it. But if you try to get one up on the universe, and you're in competition with it, that means you don't understand you are it. You think there's a real difference between "self" and "other." But "self", what you call yourself, and what you call "other" are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They're really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it's all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one. If you try to make the south pole defeat the north pole, or get the mastery of it, you show you don't know what's going on."
Supposedly, the illusion of self is not there; there is only an understanding of the ego, with that understanding the ego drops. This is one man's notion: http://www.realization.org/page/namedoc0/moe/moe_1.htm For me it felt like actual physical death. U. G. Krishnamurti says that his brain glands went through changes. Some people say that they feel that their head is on fire. I don't know. Supposedly, wisdom is the absence of ego. If one is empty of ego they are full of wisdom. One does not defeat ignorance, one understands ignorance. With that understanding it drops, one transcends through existential understanding. "Understanding" is existential, it is not a mental rumination, it is not a contemplation. Supposedly, when one wants to think one thinks, and when one has no need to keep thinking, thinking stops. Supposedly, they are not re-actions but conscious actions, actions done with full awareness. The action will only be true for that one certain subject, it may very well be different when responding to another individual. No two people are the same, so each will get a different response.
Leave it to GanjaPrince to stick his nose into other people's conversations. Oh well. There are probably more kinds of love in this world than you can count on two hands. Some of them light and superficial, some of them deep and serious. Yes, Hitler was serious. So was Ghandi. Yes, Bush is serious. So was the Buddha. The problem lies not in seriousness, it lies in other areas. (In the case of Hitler, it was racism, and in the case of Bush, it is absolute stupidity.) I read the most of this. This man has many interesting things to say, and I was intrigued.
So was Ghandi Yeah right, Ghandi was known for his laugh, anybody crazy enough to fast to stop a war is not a serious person
hahaha.... you're right, GP, love is lightness and laughter, but it is also in many other things. when i said seriousness, i was referring to the intense curiousity and willingness to fall headlong into a new concept that i admire in H's posts, and surely where such strong feelings live for the world, love lives too.
i think there are definitely different levels of freedom. i mean, people now say "i have free will", but from a grander point of view, like all-knowledge, that measly little human hasn't got free will at all, because he doesn't actually know what's going on before he acts. that's interesting. so if you, for example, have accomplished a state of fractured mind where you observe yourself from a distance, what have you accomplished? a kind of freedom; do you say you are still ignorant? i think i understand. may i ask you, how old are you and how long have you been practicing meditation? sophia.
Yes love is everywhere, you are right. I just wish that everyone had to way marx brothers glasses everytime they use the word serious... the serious glasses... got that idea from Wavy Gravy, a organization he works for Seva that helps blind people practice this in thier board meetings.
It's just a sort of small satori. Now I know that it can be done. A lot of tims when I can't sleep I just ignore the mind, it keeps on doing its thing and I go to sleep. So I don't bother telling it to shut up, if it wants to waste its time and energy, so be it, but I don't have to listen to it or get identified with it. On a side note, when I'm sleeping and I am not in the mood for a sex dream I'll tell myself to move my body so the dream (or nightmare) goes away. Like I said, the "hardest" part is waking up, when I can see a blank quiet state and then see thoughts creeping in, or continuing from when I went to sleep, and seeing layers of thoughts forming, overlapping themselves. There is no freedom, I'm still tethered to desire and the mind. I still have to deal with other people, still have to deal with life. About 15 - 20 years. Older than I care to state.
