day job

first off let me say i don't really like the term 'total enlightenment' or even 'enlightenment' really, because it implies an end point to the struggles and growth of a person. there is never a point where we will stop growing. reality is infinite.

it is true that when we impose our morality on situations that distinctions arise. but i still believe that there is some kind of objectivity to be based off of. you can't justify killing human life as just 'being' and say that any kind of objections that someone might have is a product of manufactured subjective morality. that obviously causes suffering, and there is an obvious difference between suffering and compassion and love.

even though suffering does have its place in society, and its lessons to teach us, i don't believe that it is as nearly as beneficial as love(for lack of a better term) can be. you take someone and put them in an enviroment prone to suffering, and you take another person and you put them in an enviroment prone to love, compassion, and empathy, and the person in the latter enviroment is sure to have grown more, and become a stronger person.

everything is exactly as it should be, but it is still important to not let being content because of that breed apathy. there is still progression to be made, and growth to be had, and i believe that part of that is found in overcoming suffering. i guess that is the main lesson that suffering has to teach us -- how to overcome it by our own free will.

that was one of the main points i was trying to make. enlightenment for the sake of self is useless. enlightenment is for everyone -- and as is overcoming suffering.

p.s. i can't help but think how funny it is trying to articulate these thoughts

 

Hey pardner!
It really sounds to me like we are both saying the same thing, just viewing it differently and phrasing it differently.
For the person who comes to the point of understanding that all is as it is meant to be at any given point in time, often the next action is to reach out and offer themselves up to others totally and without reservation in love and compassion for those who are in need.
That also is just as it should be at that moment in time.
Understanding that does not free one from any responsibility to others, on the contrary, it makes such responsibility an imperative and necessity.

If the suffering didn't exist then where 's the oppurtunity for compassion and love?

It is all as it should be.

 

haha yea thats why i said i thought it was funny trying to articulate these thoughts. we are both saying the same thing and articulating it differently. seems rather ironic to me! :smilielol5:

 

love reading this thread. great discussion.

but a real logical question then arises for me. Just really, i mean is it really possible for complete world peace? i mean, i guess not COMPLETELY, it's so vast and infinite that you might as well throw the word "completely" away. so...i'm not sure what i'm trying to say then. it seems like we can definitely move much further forward towards world peace than we are at right now.

what's very peculiar about this point in time in my opinion is that if things get much worse, if the tensions build much higher, which i assume they're going to, then we have the technological capacity these days to completely whipe out the entire planet with things such as nukes.

so i feel like we're reaching a tipping point in history, and it almost seems like the toss of the dice or the flipping of a coin of which way it goes. either we're all gonna completely be annhilated in a planetary self-destruction OR a radical shift in the entire planet's consciousness will occur in a very profound way, and even though it will be extremely ugly in one way it will be extremely beautiful in another way as a fundamental shift happens in our global realization of oneness.

or perhaps the only outcome is that somehow BOTH options occur simultaneously in some mysterious and unknown and unfathomable way. Perhaps the second coming of Jesus will come AND the Antichrist will come at the same point in time, only to reveal that they're the same being. But now i'm starting to get a little carried away with myself.

then you have ufos and the 5th dimension to consider too.

2012 anyone?

i know i'm being a tad irrational here...i'm pretty much half joking, half theorizing, half enjoying myself. but i'm also half serious.

 

Any year holds the possibility to change the course of history. ANY YEAR, 2012 is not special. Anyway, nukes are not a problem anymore. We have missile defense systems that provide an umbrella of protection from them. Less wealthy countries are fucked though.

Anyway, tensions between empires of this world will continue to mount because we are running out of resources. Hopefully we will put aside our squabbles so that we can get off this planet and continue the species but I doubt that will happen.

 

The chance of an actual nuclear exchange between any of the nations that posses them is pretty small. The real concern in regards to a nuke is that some small radical nation/group gets thier hands on one. Sailing a nuke into a harbor or something along those lines is a lot more likely than missiles being launched. Some are concerned about the idiot in N. Korea, but he won't do shit because all he has ever done is try to blackmail and threaten to get what he wants from the rest of the world. He launches a missile at anyone and he will quickly just become a greasy spot on the map and he knows it. I would be more concerned about someone with a religious motivation a lot more than someone with a political one as far as that goes.

What the world needs is a small asteroid or comet strike, just enough to wipe the chalkboard clean and start writing a new episode.

 

Honestly if every stable country had nuclear weapons it'd probably stop all wars for ever. There's a reason why the cold war never turned hot. Why Soviet tanks never entered wester berlin, why America never escalated the war in Korea and wouldn't cross the Chinese border after China entered it, ect.

 

Or shift in Earth's polar magnetism, for example.
I think we went so far with conflicts that only something bigger than us has to happen for us human to realise that only together we can live on mother Earth, careing for and loving each other and mother Earth. We wounded Earth so much that her suffering has to end on this or that way. Eighter we heal her wounds, or she wipes us out, but she needs to be healed in order to exist. Maybe nature takes care of itself by making us destroy each other, or if we happen to awake from this "seek and destroy" reality and start a new chapter in human history, we might be humble enough to beg for forgivnes for what we did and take care that we don't make the wounds deeper, we might survive as a species. But shift needs to happen and I strongly believe in that, that's why we need to continue to show others the way of love and forgiveness. Thats why it is selfish to go somwhere in the mountain and be "enlighten" for yourself. Beeing enlighten means to live by rules of love and try not to do anything that will hurt anything or anybody, to show that same way to others. If you want the world to change, you need to be that same change and to lead by example.

By the way, did anybody watch the movie (or read the book) The Celestine Prophecy? There you can find step by step way of enlightening and to see that everybody is invited, everybody is equaly important.
I would highly recomend it specially for novice psychonauts, it can help you understand your acid trip and to give you guidlines what to look, to start from yourself and find the source of your problems deep inside you, don't look outside to find who is quilty because of your suffering. If everybody started from theirselfs and tried to be the best person they can that day, you woudn't need police, army, laws....... You would be your own judge and punisher, and to be honest, nobody can hurt me that much how I can hurt myself (if you understand what I mean).
But as we said earlier, something dramatic needs to happen for that global shift to happen. In a meantime, I will always be a Shapeshifter

Peace and Love!!!

 

I wonder if there are hippy cancer cells out there saying "Hey man, peace and love, we need to heal this body and live in harmony with it. Not kill it!"

 

The more intense the fear of that probability and given the geographical space of the developing situation the more feasible might seem the use of a few anti personnel neutron devices.

 

i'm pretty sure the reason the u.s. never entered china was because we didn't have the personel or the resources to wage a war across the pacific against a nation whose army was much bigger than ours.

but it is true that nuclear weapons do prevent war. that was actually the original intentions of the bomb. to save the lives of our soldiers who were dieing to japanese in the pacific -- and it worked.

although i'm not sure that people back then were quite aware of the monster they awoke. it's kind of to the point where we have two options: peace, or annihilation.

and i know this isn't really relavent but one of my relatives actually used to work on the manhatten project. lots of pretty cool top secret stuff.

/brag off, lol.

 

my thoughts on the always continuing dialog...

for my own mind it has been helpful to shift the perspective of holding enlightenment as the idea of somthing to move towards, into enlightenment as the idea of somthing to maintain. everything in life requires continual maintenance. absolutely everything.
when an individual loses balance either within themselves or in their relation to the world, a stiffness or rigidity is acumulated that ultimatly needs to be dissolved and dispelled. i dont believe for a second we are ever capable of moving beyond suffereing, i think the point is to process and dissolve what suffereing we encounter, when we encounter it. releasing it and not gathering and holding it. since the only way to release or transmute suffereing is to feel it fully, we are bound to it in the moments we are confronted by it.
the enlightened ideal is a clean slate, its life and pain processed and released. a clean slate is easy enough to muck up though without maintaining inner disapline. i know in my own life anyway this is the reason for the ups and downs...somtimes i feel like i get it and its simple enough, but its always a lack of disapline that results in the backslide until i find myself in a place where it seems almost impossible to fully cleanse and mainain clarity...to operate on the level where i can be trasmuting what comes when it comes.

this is really what is meant by be here now.

 

What happens if be here now simply meant be here now?
Wouldn't things be so much easier?
Lol
I dig your explanation though, I think that's more of a result of being here now, not so much what it means. Because it is a literal statement, though applies to the individuals state of mind. Get out of the past and future and experience this moment as it is.

 

right...expirience the moment as it is. not every moment is butterflyes and sunshine. being here now means expirienceing those moments as well as the ones with mosquitos and thunderstorms.

 

So yeah, day jobs anyone? lol

 

i agree with everything you're saying other than the idea that something needs to be maintained. but perhaps this comes from the "teachings" i've delved into, which emphasize to "achieve total failure", meaning that trying to sustain enlightenment is only your mind/ego trying to maintain that perfect state. And as long as there's something trying to maintain it, it's just hindering the process, because you don't gain enlightenment by making it happen, rather, it happens by itself when you get your self out of the way. in other words, the dormant freedom within you doesn't need your help, other than to stop trying so hard to make something happen. the process happens all by itself once you begin to let go and surrender.

this is what they mean when they say "failure is the means to success", it just means to allow yourself to get to that place where there's no way out, where you can't escape, and to not try to escape either...it's that place where absolutely nothing works but paradoxically where everything works.

that's just my interpretation on it.

but all of these are just words at the end of the day.

 

yes. so, yea, again, i think we're saying the same thing just in different ways.

 

An enlightened master once said, look for no state but the state you're in already. Sums up a lot lol.

 

well, my bike chain is quite rusty right now and in need of an good oiling. if i dont take care of it, its just going to continue to degrade, and before long wont be of any use at all. if i had been taking care of it, it wouldnt be as damaged as it is now. because i wasnt taking care of it, its not functioning at its optimal level and its effecting the quality of my bike riding.

i think the point of whomever it is advocating the teachings of total failure is that in total failure your likely to make realizations that would illuminate the(a) way for you. not that total failure is the point or end all, just a catalyst. it sounds like a good way to realize that what we're holding onto, we can do without. but it dosent mean we have to do without, to understand the worth/worthlessness (equal as they are) of what we have.

the maintenance is in continually carrying these realizations that free up our highest visions. its easy enough to speak and intellectually understand enlightenment, but doing and being is another story...it does require intent and disapline to develop patterns of being and doing, maintenance to clease your vision when you start to lose sight of your truth. becoming numbed and jaded is the result of a lapse in continual awarness of truth. its easy to do. the more numb and jaded you are, the harder it is to see clearly....its a real viscious cycle. ime

and imo the difference between being enlightened and being an enlightened master is the capacity to maintain the realizations of your higher visions. i think most people on this forum are enlightened...never met anyone who can fully maintain and actualize their realizations though. i dont really know if its possible in the fullest, but certainly it is in degrees.

edit: geez its startin to sound alot like work isnt it? perhaps thread is on topic afterall

 

I want all my moments to be puppy dogs and daisy's.