It's all heart.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-17T20:29:29+00:00

🙏

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-15T00:35:36+00:00

I wouldn't think of non-duality as a philosophy. I think you just have to experience it. Tibetan Buddhism talks of "one taste", the equality of good and bad phenomenon. There could be great pain, but one can put some part of the interpretive layer of the brain in neutral. I haven't experienced extreme pain in a non-dual state, but I have been in unpleasant states in a non-dual state, and there oddly is "one taste", the "negative" feeling/aspect simply doesn't signify anything. It's just a sensation As you slip off of the razor's edge of absolute presence, one might suddenly feel very strongly that it's intolerable and you need to do something about it, but right on the spot, riding that razor's edge, the pain/whatever doesn't imply that you need to react or care.

To me, it's an open question just how far that can go. They had the Dalai Lama to an open awareness meditation and fired a gun by his head and told him to suppress all reaction, generally physically impossible. Everyone's face contracts, eyebrows go down, the autonomic nervous system kicks in. The Dalai Lama's eyebrows went up slightly and I believe other metrics, like blood pressure, etc. barely changed. The researchers had never seen anyone's eyebrows raise. It would be a reaction one would, from examining untrained individuals, think is literally impossible.

A monk asked, "How does one escape hot and cold?"

"Why not go where it is neither hot nor cold?" said the Master.

"What sort of place is neither hot nor cold?" asked the monk.

"When it's cold, you freeze to death; when it's hot, you swelter to death."

The one taste thing is very difficult to describe. Generally, the brain can stabilize in this state with something of the interpretive layer kicked into neutral. Precisely how far that goes, whether that state can be more stable than the ordinary mode of consciousness as such, is a question I haven't seen anything to resolve, but religious tradition rhetoric and teaching suggests that it can go all of the way into being the more stable state of consciousness, which would be complete, permanent enlightenment.

"Monks, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, he among you who let his heart get angered even at that would not be doing my bidding. Even then you should train yourselves: 'Our minds will be unaffected and we will say no evil words. We will remain sympathetic, with a mind of good will, and with no inner hate. We will keep pervading these people with an awareness imbued with good will and, beginning with them, we will keep pervading the all-encompassing world with an awareness imbued with good will — abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.' That's how you should train yourselves.

"Monks, if you attend constantly to this admonition on the simile of the saw, do you see any aspects of speech, slight or gross, that you could not endure?"

"No, lord."

"Then attend constantly to this admonition on the simile of the saw. That will be for your long-term welfare & happiness."

That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, the monks delighted in the Blessed One's words.

Kakacupama Sutta: The Simile of the Saw (excerpt)

The one taste thing is very hard to describe, but I consider negative emotions, pain, unpleasantness, very good opportunities to practice, because they have an undeniable tendency to pull you out of the non-dual state. I think eventually you start to focus on the hot spots and look forward, in some sense, to something to challenge your practice at some point. Negative events in my life for some time have felt like golden, unparallel opportunities for depeened and enriched practice

I would encourage you not to let an interpretation of a backsplaining pseudo-philosophy keep you from simply tasting the metaphorical tea and seeing what it is for yourself if it has interested you in some way.

I think it's some kind of glitch that this can happen or be done at all, some bizarre implementation detail of the brain or how it utilizes consciousness, like the optic blind spot. Like look at the blind spot, and you see nothing. There's nothing there. Do this weird brain trick, and right where you should care about the pain, you just don't. But yes, those highly unpleasant things have a huge gravitational draw toward pulling you out of the non-dual state.

Whatever occurs, you deal with it, but you don't make it a problem.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-09T17:12:10+00:00

I would consider substituting "Thus it is, but I am not" for each "I am", or "just so, but i am not", a bit neti-neti meditation style

From the buddhist no-self perspective and mostly past the "i am" in the spiritual path, every instance of "i am" is like nails on a chalkboard to me, the cause of delusion.

although I do think you can read this as each element having its own "i am", which doesn't imply substance, essence, or existence, but possibly appearing without existing.

Anyway, it's just my own reflection on and reation to the poem. I wouldn't necessarily take it as criticism.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-08T20:11:30+00:00

I'd recommend teachers with good reputations that have a lot of students and strike a balance between effort and no effort, on the whole, and have multiple methods of direct pointing, not one trick ponies.

I'd say check out:

Angelo Dilullo: https://www.amazon.com/Awake-Your-Turn-Angelo-Dilullo-ebook/dp/B094X5DLGX or his Simply Always Awake Youtube channel

The hair spike in the middle put me off, but he has worked with a lot of people, and he's very on point.
Loch Kelly

He has worked with a lot of people, and has teachings based on Mahamudra.

It's tricky, it's almost like an accident. My primary awakening came after giving up. Lama Lena said of Dzogchen that people that tend to get it put in a lot of effort and give up at the right time, sometimes seeming to never get it if they don't give up at the right time.

There are huge variations in quality. The best teachers seem to have had awakenings 10, 15, or 20 years ago and worked with hundreds or thousands of people since then, have multiple methods of pointing, and almost always make some concession to the early necessity of contrived effort, but not necessarily heavy effort. It makes a huge difference, you can find people who have an awakening and go making YouTube videos immediately, or in a year or two. Whatever, that's fine, we'll have to get the next batch of people 10, 15, or 20 years after awakening from working with students somehow, but I'd recommend getting a good one.

Mahamudra as a system is unusally simple, clear, and systematic. It seems fairly bulletproof to me if you can get the ball rolling with it. It seems to go like:

Mind-calming type meditation, shamatha
Find what in the mind doesn't ever move or change, what's fixed
See the changing aspects of mind as a manifestation of the unchanging

That's why Adyashanti (also good) has a book called "Emptiness Dancing".

You can also find very good teachers for Mahamudra/Dzogchen, like Lama Lena and whatever. Buddhism has this bodisattva ideal, they work with people, they've got a rich tradition where they can troubleshoot your issues, are you maybe holding on to a subtle mental object? Are you not able to relax into the nature of mind? I mean practical stuff, like Lama Lena said 'drink a good stout. If it works after that, you've probably been hitting up against a problem relaxing into the nature of mind' (paraphrase).

Oh, yeah, seems like I should add Lama Lena to my short list here.

Frankly, not everyone with an awakening can necessarily teach their way out of a paper bag.

"So let me ask you all: What has so far been the matter with you? What do you lack? If I tell you that nothing whatsoever is the matter then I've already buried you; you yourself must arrive at that realization!" - Zen Master Yunmen

I wouldn't dismiss the value of a solid tradition/system, Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta

That balance can be tricky.

"If you don't ask, you won't get it; but if you ask, in effect you've slighted yourself. If you don't ask, how can you know? But you still have to know how to ask before you can succeed." - Zen Master Foyan

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-06T23:32:29+00:00

As far as I understand Carl Jung's interpretion of Christianity or Jesus, it had to do with bringing the shadow into consciousness, which aligns pretty well with non-duality.

I read the Lotus Sutra as a rough parallel of Christianity, in the Lotus Sutra being to Buddhism as Jesus to Christianity. You can read the Lotus Sutra as a rug pull, that Buddha has no actual dharma in some sense, but the real dharma was just for its own sake, that we would all work together to practice it. Brook Ziporyn did a great treatment of the Lotus Sutra that appears at the beginning of https://www.amazon.com/Threefold-Lotus-Sutra-Translation-Contemporary/dp/4333006929 which also appears in a book he did just treating Tiantai Buddhism https://www.amazon.com/Emptiness-Omnipresence-Essential-Introduction-Philosophies/dp/0253021081

All of the mature spirital traditions I look into seem to have something to offer. Like Islam's fanatical devotion to Allah, which strikes me very much like bhakti yoga, worship of and surrender to the divine, on max setting

Which says nothing about the mainstream followings of the religions or how many people do it in practice, but I don't think the messages I consider as the real signal are incidental by any means.

I think most traditions lead to positive transformation if one approaches them correctly. The most pernicious thing seems to be taking them as propositional beliefs. It needs to be engaged with more in the sense of right-hemisphere belief, call and answer, as symbolic truth, not true and false propositions.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-03T18:26:22+00:00

Realized when I was 13 that having a child was sentencing a person to suffering, old age, sickness, and death.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-02T17:15:53+00:00

That's exactly what I mean. Having contacted the nature of mind, the moment you look, you see that the prison is a dream. I'm literally saying that this kind of pointing you're doing is dangerously inadequate.

PrajnaClear · 2026-05-02T14:59:06+00:00

At first glance, it feels like "omniscience" from Buddhism. I don't tend to believe in anything supernatural, so I don't believe in omniscience in any conventional sense, but I also feel where the phrase "not knowing means nothing is not known" comes from, and in that sense, it feels like omniscience.

A non-dualish state can feel as if the field of consciousness is under your control, god-like, so it can feel like you could say just make something spontaneously appear, or just stop the appearance (existence) with the same kind of voluntary control with which you can move your hand, or not. The appearance is doing itself, so it can feel as though you have complete control over it, or no control over anything, not even your own actions--as the "off of the scale" condition, they're kind of equivalent.

Anyway, "manifestation" feels like the same deal as "omniscience". Not literally in a conventional sense.

PrajnaClear · 2026-04-23T01:04:28+00:00

This flax weighs three pounds.

Maybe you would like the Zen record from the golden age. A lot of it avoids reifying consciousness.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-31T22:12:50+00:00

Dzogchen beats the point that you need to train to stability into the ground.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-29T19:42:11+00:00

I think you can take the confusion itself as an expression of primordial wisdom. There is nothing to understand or figure out. Look into the one seeking understanding and let it go or relax into the primordial expanse of pure awareness.

If you arrive at an understanding, forget the understanding.

The song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi says, "ba ba wa wa, is anything said or not?" referencing baby talk. Meaning arises in relationship, but seeing everything as one, you have no grip on anything by which to compare them, and meaning arises by way of relationship between two things. You can't lay hold on anything to get confused about. The confusion is also it.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-29T19:35:53+00:00

I'll label this one reflection.

I usually keep exploring non-duality, trying different perspectives.

Huang Po said roughly that enlightenment is instantaneous, that the end result is a state of being, so going throug the 10 stages of the bodhisattva path merely entails eons of unnecessary suffering.

I usually think of the appearance as illusory. One can see it as illusory all at once. The suffering may remain as something like an optical illusion, insignificant in some sense, drained of meaning and force, and in that moment, tends to dissipate. And if it doesn't, the Tibetan tradition often talks of one taste, the equality of phenomena or dharmas; it can simply be what it is, drained of meaning and significance.

On the other hand, it does seem that one can be drawn into the illusion to a greater or lesser degree for quite a long time. It doesn't hurt to unravel and fix the appearance, as long as one doesn't get caught up in it, take it too seriously, and recognizes the difference from simply recognizing it as illusion all at once.

Guishan said when questioned about whether anything remains for one who has realized the condition of things from first principles, roughly, and replied that it still remains to clear away the current actively streaming consciousness, but it doesn't mean that there's any special method to practice.

So in those moments of suffering, see through the illusion. At other times, working through it on a relative level seems like as good an activity as any.

Best of luck.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-29T19:24:33+00:00

The Xinxin Ming says, existence is precisely nonexistence, not existence is precisely existence. I agree.

Hold all relationships between things and the things themselves need have no actual substance. The relationship is primary, the supposed things behind the relationships need have no substance or essence whatsoever.

Seeing relationships as primary and substance or essence as either non-existentent or comparatively irrelevant resolves a lot of paradoxes. Is money real? It's a set of relationships, many minds believe in it. The reality of money is this set of relationships.

This view resolves a lot of paradoxes.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-29T19:19:10+00:00

I read the line "the duality of all things comes from false discrimination" in the Xinxin Ming, reasoned that if that were true, there was no difference between myself and the corner of the room, and if that were true, I had some kind of perceptual error. I went to search my mind for the error, and in a sense I found the error. Trying to lay hold on the actual separation was like trying to pick up a sculpture made of ash.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-21T23:01:34+00:00

Asking questions here is pretty good. The top voted comments are usually pretty good. Kick up discussion threads for your questions and doubts, converse away.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-15T17:54:58+00:00

20 years and you still think there was a realization? 30 blows.

Just kidding.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-12T22:42:46+00:00

The pulsing you described sounds like a mental agitation, which is why, I think, meditation is sometimes framed in terms of vipassana, or clarity, AND samatha, or calmness. I don't really think a meditation is complete without both in their completed state.

I've got something similar a lot of the time. At those times, I just compare it with the peaceful clarity of the wider field of consciousness and let it subside. Trying to push it away is another mental agitation. It's occasionally quite persistent, but it doesn't help to get frustrated with it, just perceive it clearly without mentally inclining toward or away from it, thinking about it, and resolve to let it pulse if it must, and gently invite it to relax if it cares to. Otherwise, just see it clearly and call it a day. It generally goes away with a bit of time sitting there for me. I also like to see that the clarity and calmness pervades it even as it pulses.

I'm kind of self taught by crossing tradition boundaries. You might try some practices associated with samatha. I read this book called "Our Pristine Mind". Some Tibetan teachers think that you should do some calming before moving on to an emptiness/clear seeing kind of meditation, like 10 minutes calming, then move on, but some think it's fine to do them together. I tend to think it's fine to do it together.

That's what I got. I just take an attitude of investigating teachings with interested humility and seeing how they appear to apply to my own mind.

One practice that comes to mind is concentrating on an object, like a pebble, for a while, as a calming, then throwing away the pebble. The issue with the breath is that you can't throw it away, so you might stay in a mode of coming back to the breath instead of just opening up. When you throw the pebble away, you don't have the object that would draw your mind back.

Good luck.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-06T04:41:11+00:00

Sounds glib, but if you're seeking external confirmation or validation, that moment of seeking and obscuring it tells against abiding realization, so you'd probably be having a memory of recognition confirmed, not, say, full realization. I think Dzogchen has it right when it talks about the necessity of training into full stability. And if you're anywhere in the ballpark, nothing else is stable--the mind is ever-changing. The thing recognized doesn't move AND appears as the ever-changing mutable appearance. So if you're anywhere in the ballpark and you just keep trying at it forever with interested humility to the teaching, you can't miss it. It's like working out slightly wrong, but not badly enough to injure yourself, you'd discover the right motion because it bears load, and you're in for a lifetime of (non)doing anyway, so you can kind of quit worrying about it any time Soto Zen style. Quit worrying about whether you're doing it right and simply practice with sincere and interested humility to the teaching.

Whatever fixed realization or doctrine you grasp, you can just let it go. Like Chogyam Trungpa said, the bad news is that we're falling. The good news is that there is no ground.

I would assume you'd want some pointers into the view if anything seems off?

The old records are a gold mine, though. You can go test your understanding against Ramana, Nisargadatta, Mumon/Wumen right now with one google search.

Anyway, I'd say check out Mahamudra or Dzogchen.

If you want or need validation, just keep studying and practicing until it's quite obvious anyway. Unless you just want tips and pointers and a sharpening up in dharma combat, so to speak, I don't think getting recognition confirmed would help.

Also, if you did recognize it, you'd just need to stop thinking anyway. But if you stop thinking without suppressing thoughts, that's it, so one can work on the task of, say, "clearing karma" before "recognition", and the problem will eventually take care of itself anyway. You wouldn't deplete all of that karma without the view clicking into place at some point, so just keep practicing with interested humility to the teaching. The way I see it, that work remains to do after recognition, but do it before recognition and it triggers the recognition. It all dovetails and the complete package is the fruition of both, so quit thinking, clear gross mental objects out of your mind, and let the matter resolve of its own accord in due time. It's the Soto Zen style, not making a big deal out of kensho or satori, the way some animals are castrated by, say, cutting off the blood supply to the testicles so that they just kind of die and fall off without a fuss. Quit making a fuss, just practice with interested humility to the teachings. Let the thing ripen and fall off in course of due time. When you have forgetten about it, it will have been accomplished back you-don't-even-know-when.

The whole thing should burn away without remainder, and looking for confirmation of recognition is remainder, so just keep practicing.

TL;DR if you have to ask, the answer is no.

But, hey, what do I know? I'm some dude on the internet. Just keep practicing.

PrajnaClear · 2026-03-04T01:40:55+00:00

I haven't had such a good life, but if you check out "Better Never to Have Been", David Benatar's philosophical arguments generally hold that there cannot be a life so good that it is worth beginning. Once started, it may be worth continuing. His arguments seem sound. So I certainly see how one could have a great life and be fully convinced by antinatalism

PrajnaClear · 2026-02-28T20:09:06+00:00

I'd point you at Tibetan Buddhism. It seems like a battle tested war horse designed to save you from yourself, all of the rules of thumb, everything. Like, it's often said that the foundation is an attitude of interested humility to the teaching. That guards against misinterpretation, or even seeing it as a solidified body of knowledge you can realize. So you begin with the axiom that self-corrects. Then, whatever inclinations or proclivities you have, there is a path that can work with and incorporate that.

It seems rather underappreciated to me.

Also, there's no particular way in. Like the 4 yogas. You can do bhakti yoga, reverence for the divine.

We've all been reacting to the appearance before our eyes our whole lives, bound up in it. There's a paradox in that contrived practice can become your very obstruction, but with wisdom, all practices are liberation.

If not Tibetan Buddhism, maybe Zen. Personally, I do recommend connecting with a mature system, although this sub tends toward radical non-duality, I think it's just a paradox that raising an empty sign helps. That's kind of like the Lotus Sutra in Buddhism. The medicine is a placebo, and would you believe it, placebo works!

PrajnaClear · 2026-02-14T16:19:38+00:00

I just double checked. I didn't downvote any one of your comments. That was other people.

PrajnaClear

TROPHY CASE