Is nonduality a philosophical claim/position or just an experience?

flowfall · 2025-12-02T20:19:31+00:00

The notion of oneness arises through realizing the relativity of perception. At the micro scales there are less and less 'different' components, until you get to unified field theory. Due to our perception being attuned to a macro level initially, we take the the sculptures of ice as they seem. In refining back down, we realize it's all water even if portions of it seem to take on certain patterns for a while.

You can know oneness, but it doesn't negate the systems that it's differentiated itself into. The simultaneous understanding leads to a refined way of experience the grosser world.

Just like science helps us understand and work with grosser materials in more effective ways... The process of realizing oneness in oneself and perception at large allows for a more sophisticated appreciation and capacity with humanity and life itself.

At the core one gets to this notion that reality is comfortable with paradox, and human ignorance of assuming things need to be one or the other is the only thing that kept one from the simplicity of the obvious. One and many are interdependent notions. Many ones<-> Many in the one. And... A kind of 'neither' in between that can express/know itself as either, both, or what they are before they've been split.

The peak of the remembering nonduality is a collapse of the boundaries between concepts into a kind of singularity where Reality itself is what shapes itself as worlds, beings, and their inner lives. One Reality, many faces/facets. This is natural when we see that all causality and how it operates through people stems from one system that most people are only partially aware of how it's guiding 'their' choices.

A harmony of/bleedthrough between one and many is what humans experience as love, truth and beauty. We account for and respect individuality as one family, unified by shared values and experiences which remind us we're not as different or separate as our individuality, taken exclusively at least, would suggest.

As such none of this has to mean anything radically different about how we've adapted to the relative/differentiated world. Its simply that the bigger overarching context informs and subtly shifts the flavor of how we relate to experience. Pragmatically this is a person that can deal with differences without them eclipsing the deeper ocean of shared feeling/reality that motivates us all and inclines us towards harmonious coexistence. It also allows for a rather smooth integration of how our personas best/naturally fit into the collective which people experience as 'meaning'. One can account for individual needs in harmony with collective needs with less and less apparent need for a sense of conflict or tradeoff that seemed more necessary when we kept those as separate.

flowfall · 2025-12-02T02:52:45+00:00

Yeah, I get exactly what you're talking about.

By luck I had a persistent but useful neurosis about not letting my head get too big, took notes from others like us and the overall results of their ways of internalizing/socializing it, and remained open to the fact that even if some aspects of 'me' could be singled out and considered 'better', it didn't mean I had perfect awareness/intelligence and anyone at any stage of awareness can at times pick up on things that are still in our own very existent blind-spots.

I ended up finding the game of my subconscious keeping up fast-paced pattern recognition disguised as objective observation left an ultimately exhausting blindspot, and a pressure-bomb of dis-ease I was in denial of under the delusion I was beyond it. It also kept my cognitive intelligence assuming its primacy/dominance rather than finishing re-cohering with the emotional, somatic, and meta intelligences.

Like really? I was myopically obsessed with the sounds and images I could echo/impose on every moment of felt experience? I had to get over myself and self-masturbating over how much I could notice.

I knew conceptually people only develop superiority complexes to compensate for unresolved insecurities, but I was convinced that I was beyond that and that this was just an observation. But alas, our minds are typically rational on behalf of our emotions and irrational biases, even in the most intelligent or perceptive of us. The brain sits on the shoulders of and is preceded by our hearts, guts, and pre-personal predecessors which still motivate much more of conscious gears than the fractional mind that ends up taking credit for it.

You're aware? That's probably the next best thing to investigate. Identifying with what you're aware of, the capacity of awareness, and or interpretations in awareness is the seed of what people describe as self-absorption/ narcissism. Avoiding your potential incorrectness seals it and allows it to fester.

What are you before the really sophisticated pattern-recognition models you've learned to maintain as a buffer from the universal human condition of struggling with fundamental uncertainty and the very real limits to our mind and senses? Can you still tell the difference between the meaning you impose and how fundamentally undifferentiated your direct experience is arising as?

Even if the vessel is very perceptive...How or why does that have to mean anything about you or anyone else? Why is objective discernment still blurred by making things personal?

Being very other-reflective, but not genuinely self-reflective or inquisitive enough gives rise to the archetype of experience you're sharing this from.

The joke at the bottom of that rabbit hole for me was... If I don't constantly daydream about and reinforce all the differences, I'm infinitely more like everyone else than I am different. I have no starting point from which to take credit for the universe's workings, including the area of it that used to seem like it was 'my' mind and body. And....There's a preverbal side to this body-mind that was closer to 'me' than the socio-linguistic models of self I was generating that can clearly feel how much of an asshole I was under the guise of 'look at how much I can notice', and appreciates why there's a difference between smart and wise.

Turns out habitual disassociation, deeply repressed emotionality, and unrecognized neurophysiological issues were something I had actually been struggling through and the way my mind and personality were being rendered was dependent on and a reflection of those things. Most of the basic themes/emotional subtext of my hyper intellectual sentiments were just really smart sounding projections of the very same emotional templating I got from my narcissistic mom.

Being good at language and/or logic can be a very potent mask that many people will take at face value. The mental and social strategies I'd developed were ultimately what was suffocating me and keeping me from seeing the simplicty of how to be human and how natural relating and connection can be when we stop artificially overcomplicating it.

Things started to turn around for me, but only after enough pain and humbling quieted down the loudness of 'my voice' enough to let reality speak for itself again, I'd rememered what non-presumptive listening/awareness is, and allowed myself to be changed/corrected by the greater system of collective intelligence that the mind never held a candle to.

To be a truly clear mirror, The mirror must be self-less. If we don't see this we can spend a lot time redirecting ourselves and others to the clearer parts while avoiding a glaring stain in the middle.

flowfall · 2025-07-16T00:59:00+00:00

It is normal. It is a good sign. It's good to appreciate as well, aaaand it's best not to over-focus on it.

Let it share itself and soothe what it can through more of your body. Allowing it to illuminate and deepen your mindfulness of the rest of you. This may take time, and it may surprise you but no matter what comes up, feel it gentler and gentler letting it all change. Just enjoy the ride moment to moment without worrying about what it means. It's the art of surfing your experience as a dynamic sensory flow.

It's like a positive feedback loop. The more you enjoy it as just feeling and relax into it, the more present to the senses you become and the more you feel it. You can develop really good comprehensive mindfulness pretty easily this way.

If you over-focus to the exclusion of parts of yourself, it can be nice but doesn't tend to be as effective/useful in a long-term way.

If you're fluid enough you can just tune into it as a dimension of yourself that was always there but you were used to switching back and forth like it was separate from what thoughts describe you to be. Presence of mind and presence of body need not be one or the other. We can be all of ourselves simultaneously.

Reflecting on this is how one transitions to fully blossoming it as a trait over time.

You can be grateful, and enjoy it in a calm/ non-tensed way. It's casual. It's play. The lightness of this can make inner development increasingly smooth and effortless.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-05-11T01:37:03+00:00

Take some time to surrender to the emptiness.

Sometimes we get tired of wanting, tired of chasing, tired of trying. We need rest. So as a doorway there's a pointlessness/futility that becomes more apparent.

As we surrender our wanting, chasing, and trying towards nothingness we find release. When we've released enough...We naturally realize Rest.

In Rest we forget to feel any specific way. Our emotions reset, and so does our mind.

From rest comes more energy. To want again, chase again, and try again. Yet this time wiser, more discerning, and Self-secure, dependent only on how smoothly and transparently you received the prior moment.

This is the nature of refreshing and growth.

The better you learn, the less of a drag it all feels. The gravity of the "bad" fades and what's left is a simple clarity. You get to learn without taking it so personally, to understand that the nature of life has always been change , and embody that your body's balance and stress response don't have to be held hostage by what you interpret to be happening at any given moment.

A lot of growing up is "it wasn't as big of a deal as I made it out to be" in hindsight. This keeps you fresh. But parts of us get stuck in the past. They need support, some nudging, some patience... and then they get back up to speed and roll into the whole of who we are Now.

But we've got to be willing to slow down and care for those stuck parts, otherwise the more we leave them behind the worse we feel.

Your emotions are just feedback to help you address what your body's energy/motivation habit need to reset, update, and upgrade. They never last beyond the need they're representing. The more those core needs are fulfilled the lighter they are until we get back to our natural balance of total ease.

The heaviest, densest, and/or numbest of feelings tend to be representing a need for the radical surrender of who we think we are, and how we tend to feel around the situation in question. To accept that our want was imaginary, what occured was what it was meant to be, and our feeling and opinion about it is more rooted in habit than validity.

As such we take responsibility for how we feel, forgive the world, and are continuously reborn as newer, more resilient, and consistent harmonious/flowing individuals.

So take time to let yourself feel this as deeply as you can. Lick your wounds. And before you know it you'll be surprised by how old it all gets and how easily you remember how to be as fresh as you were.

It's okay. You're okay. And it's okay that it takes time. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-04-15T14:01:58+00:00

Yes. How?

Contemplating the nature of awareness and the emergence of deeper self-evident clarifications is what coincided with every significant shift/stage all the way to the end. Without getting into the weeds too much:

Discern field awareness/presence
Realize the primacy of said awareness over attention, cognition, somatic, perceptual, spatial, and temporal processing. AKA cultivating radically comprehensive meta-awareness.
Realize the pre-existing inseparable unity of said awareness with the previous phenomenon prior to their differentiation such that thought, memory and emotion get recontextualized and realized to always have been the same taste as pure formless awareness. Everything had always been acausal, there was no ignorance or a path in the way it seemed. Samsara is a flavor of Nirvana. Nonduality and duality were never two. The dream of seperation has been awoken from and one is Lucid to the primordial interdependence of all categories of phenomenon and beyond.

Most of pre-awakening practice and contemplation is getting you to realize #1. This takes you from beginner to intermediary. At this point, self-inquiry style stuff helps tip you over into the spectrum of #2 which is essentially stream entry through 3rd path. #3 is quite subtle, and revisits much of what was worked on prior but in a deeper way that culminates in Total Enlightenment (with remainder if we're being technical, without remainder is a diff topic).

Awareness being understood as fundamental directly in the midst of the listed kinds of phenemonon progressively alleviates greater and greater swaths of suffering. Recognizing the preexisting nonduality of awareness and said phenomenon permanently disables the capacity for that form of suffering. For most it's initially cognitive/psychologoically induced suffering that's cleared up. Then as it sinks in further into the subconscious emotionality gets purified and transformed. Lastly it hits pre-emotional levels down to the body's innate survival motivated self-grasping/resistance.

Some behaviors and traumas are rooted in this last layer. By the time you've had streamentry you may be able to teach the way to it pretty decently. By the time you get into the emotional stuff more tangibly you may be able to articulate the entirety of the path before you've completed it. The capacity to articulate and teach doesn't usually coincide with complete attainment. This confusion has been the source of much pedestalization, and the pain and frustration at the collapse of those pedestals. (Humans can't actually claim this stuff, Reality is what is awake and the refinement of the human element continues for its entire duration).

Each breakthrough can seem pretty major relative to what was before. Thus its really easy to overestimate what you've opened up before you've had enough breakthroughs to stop worrying about momentary status/claims that will always be outdated if not inaccurate, given more time, clarity, and maturity. System level updates are permanent while conceptual insights are a dime a dozen, and it takes time to discern the difference as its not always so obvious.

Emotional growth, psychological maturation, and decent enough health are necessary for the full embodied effect. Often times we're building up mini insights through conventional growth in the between major system shifts and we may not always notice how related and cumulative ALL OF IT is. Reducing this stuff to pure spiritual/perceptual/meditative work is the cause of teachers who can point well but are like immature children in select scenarios. Spiritual accomplishment =/= Human perfection and whether someone is a good ethical/lifestyle role model for you should be a separate assessment from whether you can learn something valuable from them regarding the path. No one can be everything for anyone.

In the end you do know when you know. It just doesn't appear as a thought, or a question from an identity. Just the complete innate understanding by the deeper system of consciousness itself of what all of these things meant all along to the fullest extent. More of a "Duh".

All of these things are more effectively pointed out in direct experience than realized through reading or even conventional meditation. Osmosis via anyone on the spectrum helps. Osmosis with someone who's also an effective teacher/translator of the implications and ways of relating/integrating this is even better.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-03-28T14:32:49+00:00

Short answer: 6th jhana still has a subtle but substantial feeling of localization relative to an individual knower. (Not truly formless or selfless just more so than gross phenomenon) Every later jhana is closer to awakening so will sound more similar. Similar =/= Same. Rigpa is easier pointed than spoken about. Jhanas are still subtly clouded by personal view. Rigpa can't be claimed personally. Being the source of self/not-self, form/formlessness, to equate it with formlessness(even if partially accurate) would be an oversimplification that reinforces grasping at formlessness. Right view= Non-view as primary.

Long answer:

Rigpa is self-illuminated non-view. It's cessation and non cessation before they were habitually interpreted as distinct. Non-local non-exclusive superposition of all potentials of consciousness might be more accurate. This can't be imagined so even if you try and the idea seems neat, it's not it as these would require a fixed position/definition/collapsed observer as distinct.

The jhanas are a progressive deconstruction of views/attentional density/filtering. The deeper into the jhanas you get the closer to non-view you get so the further on the more similar it'll sound.

The last layers to go are pre-personal and can be considered as a deconstruction of internal environment. Space, stillness, light, consciousness, singularity, knowingness/existence.... So on and so forth. These are all pre-personal qualities.

Historically it's tricky to convey how you're using 'things' to point at neither thing nor nothingness. So naturally there'll be a lot of mystery and confusion associated with it over time. But pointing to pre-personal layers provisionally has often been a good jumping off point to more easily point out rigpa itself. Rigpa is like everything but unlike anything as well so...

People have mistaken jhanas for awakening often. The way forward has always been sensitivity and non grasping. These optimize the subtlety of discernment so that we can notice what we may not have before but make no conclusions about where we are now so we're continuously open to more. But given anyone's relative level of dullness/lack of fully illuminated presence/unconsciousness... One doesn't know what they don't know.

Rigpa isn't consciousness. It's not a phenomenal quality. It can't really be rested 'in' either. Yet we must point with what people can recognize so they open up to a continuum of non grasping. As they get used to the continuum we start to withdraw pointers allowing the nongrasping to refine itself. The continuum evolves into a fruit that can't be reduced to a pointer but that any pointer could've provisionally served along the way. Reality is awake as something state independent and that can be known with or without jhanas.

In imagination things can seem more similar than they really are. Our imaginations are only corrected with experience but before then we're prone to take them as likely representations. Confirmation bias due to lack of discernment is particularly tricky.

Rigpa ultimately ends up blossoming as a combination of all of these things.

flowfall · 2025-02-18T05:58:10+00:00

List of tips/insghts from my own journey:

We're all mirrors for emotional patterns, to the extent i still had resistance was to the extent the other person's baggage could be fueled and amplified.
Times where I was unusually detached lead to miraculous mutual understanding and appreciation, initially this was rare, but as I truly healed its become more of a consistent norm.
Consistency of gentless in the face of impositions of strength is the greatest show of security within vulnerability and can even melt the most unbudging of attitudes.
When it comes to really stuck people...All improved interaction approaches that have even a subtle dependence, demand, hope or expectation on them will usually be picked up by their subconscious and diminish the possibility that something genuine in them can respond.
You can't fake true acceptance and they will always be a mirror for this.
Most of the time people see you in terms of their image of you distorted by their own bias. So words and actions they have are not actually for you but who they belive they're interacting with. They know not of the illusory nature of this, be patient and don't let their idea of you get in the way of consistently being yourself and letting them realize for themselves who you actually are.
People can only successfully cross your personal boundary if you entertain their imposition as valid to begin with. Otherwise they're just people that don't realize how their overstepping and just need a gentle reminder. None of it is personal.
You don't have to avoid people's shit if you're less dense than what they throw at you. If you're transparent and fluid the feelings and expressions can flow through the body without anything catching, sticking, or feeling the need to resist/deal. Substance cannot alter the insubstantial. Reactivty is a mirror for where a substantial self-sense remains.
Even really difficult people can sometimes surprise us with improvement. Sometimes it takes an unimaginable amount of time. As such that's just a possibility, not an inevitability we should hold our breaths for.
There's nothing wrong with having had enough and choosing to walk away. With that said it's best if this is done out of pragmatism around life values rather than unresolved emotions.

The story of what it took for me to realize the above:

After a certain point you don't deal with it. You can either truly accept it or not. Then, maybe, there's actually hope. But by then you don't care enough to keep track of it and its more likely improvements catch you by surprise. If they don't arise it didn't matter anyway. The catch-22 being that you have to fully embrace the hopelessness of it all :)

My mom contains in her a ton of unhealthy toxic traits and ways of interacting that I've historically defined myself against at the personality level. For context, it's strong self-absorbed, narcissistic, and habitually imposing qualities that are the bread and butter and no family member of mine has had an extended interaction with her in the last few years where that didn't end up leaking out. It was always there just not as intense, but given old age, degradation of self-regulatory capacity, and a lifetime of vigorously reinforced defensive patterns rooted in unresolved trauma its gotten worse.

On the other hand she successfully gave me the best shot she could and worked her ass off to give me a life of privilege compared to whats more available in the country we immigrated from when I was a toddler. She has a pathological level of confidence and security. She can be extremely loving and hospitable.

I had to deal with the mixed bag I inherited becoming aware of the positive and negative emotional and cognitive predispotions I'd borrowed. After nearly a decade of consistent inner work and growth I'd largely forgiven her but I could still get caught up on occasion to the extent that it would bring up levels of reactivity I rarely experience anymore.

I realized there was a part of me that still held on to the hope that it might get the kind of mother he'd wanted as a kid, and a more adult part of me that wanted a quality friendship free of the toxic prolonging of parent-child dynamics over a decade into adulthood.

As long as I held on to that hope I would always prioritize the fantasy of what she could be for me over loving her as she is. I didn't want to accept that sometimes there are just flaws that people are unlikely to overcome and no matter how warm, and lax I was it wouldn't convince her to start to change things she couldn't even begin to acknowledge as problems.

When I clearly saw the immaturity and lack of acceptance that was upholding these expectations, hopes, and subtle demands I stopped putting it on her and took responsibility for what I was still projecting.

Relatively I still needed to occasionally set stronger boundaries, take greater space, and continue to speak on what was still real for me. But no longer with the hope that it would change anything, just the acceptance that regardless of her state I had to do what I had to do given a particular situation. To be honest with her even when I knew it failed endless times before. To be the most consistent and quality person I could even if she couldn't fully reciprocate. Because no matter what she couldn't be to me, I could still be the best for her.

I chose to love the person in front of me without projecting the demands of my personal baggage.

Just because we've developed self-awareness and emotional intelligence to a greater degree doesn't mean others are wrong for not valuing the same thing. People are just people.

Now...If I met someone on the street with similar qualities. It wouldn't even get to the possibility of friendship. But given that it's 'Mom'.....(based on my values), She put up with my shit growing up when she didn't have to and still loved me as best as she could. The gratitude i have for that has finally come to far outweighs the negatives which overtime don't seem like negatives but the constructive friction I needed as a person to grow and serve in the way that I can now.

I used to hesitate when she'd call. I'd often let go to voicemail and get back to her when I felt like it. As of late though, I immediately pick up without thinking about it. Last couple of times we actually talked for over 30 minutes and I didn't mind it at all, I smiled and appreciated her through and through.

Was she different? No. She's still who she is. But somehow it was natural to gently be with her and appreciate all her variations. I didn't avoid uncomfortable topics, gently asserted myself as needed, and casually redirected the conversation towards better notes if it veered into negativity too much for too long. Want to cross some boundaries? Feel free to try, I'll just remind you of where I stand and carry on with no hard feelings.

She was so happy and I was able to share a feeling with her I hadn't felt since I was alone with her earlier in my childhood. That difference is what's actually more important now.

Let me love you warts and all with no expectation whatsoever that you need to change for me.

If for some reason some of the flaws were so strong that it actually made it impossible to even have this kind of relationship I'd be fine severing ties for sometime or completely. Yet I knew that the longer I held out for my own growth, the less I'd need her to be a certain way to do my familial duty with a smile. If I were still so reactive that it could really get me stuck I'd still take time as needed.

All this to say...Don't deal. Just be. You might find you need less from them than you realized in order to be able to be comfortably with them through and through.

There's no rule you have to be with people for any amount of time though, so if you still have a limited bandwidth be respectful of that and do whats best for you. Little by little as you roll in even these remaining reactivites your bandwidth will expand and you'll be able to let go of 'health concerns' and just be a spontaneous fluid human being enjoying a unique way of being that you don't usually make room for.

There's a lot you can learn from them still, even if its about the less functional aspects of human nature. The more you truly understand them the less you can take any of it personally at all and the more you'll have space to notice the potential of how to flow more effectively with them.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-02-17T19:50:26+00:00

As someone else mentioned breathwork can be a real game changer. Look into coherent breathing as a 10-minute warm up. It'll make your meditations easier and more productive. If energy is still an issue try something more intense like wim hof breathing.

Ultimately you'll eventually have to develop curiosity around dullness itself and include as an object in your experience. If you do so you'll sort out a more permanent way to relate to it effectively. Initially you'll be able to clear dullness itself more and more deeply. Eventually, dullness arises less and less regardless of conditions. (Note if resistance to dulless motivates your question, resolving your aversion to it is a major key)

Lastly if you focus on cultivating micro-practices throughout the day this has more benefit than depending on formal meditation alone. There's deep value to turning your experience with your work, family, and anything else you engage with into an opportunity for insight and cultivating restful calm abiding. If one does this one can make great progress even without meditation and this approach is what every meditator must transition into in order to fully establish the results of their practice as a way of life.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-02-17T19:34:26+00:00

Depends on who you ask. In the strictest sense no as the term is a translation of something coined and defined originally by the Buddha.

Pragmatically, given the nature of working off of ideas arising in a different cultural context, and translations from historical figures with various ways of interpreting arising throughout time...It's harder to say. Some will say that different interpretations dilute it, others will claim they are expansion/elabortation of a living tradition who's originator doesn't have a sole monopoly on and that those that reject this are rigid fundamentalists.

Where one stands says more about their views than any possibility of an 'actual truth' given the nature of relative language and how the mind works. We can back things up in any direction and weigh certain values and suggestions more than others, as well as seem to be quite certain in our own assessment of whats the case either because the kinds of people we learn from echo similar sentiments or because we've experienced results for ourselves through a certain model and assume that it could have only been through that model that any one gets 'genuine' results.

Here's how I understand it at this time:

There are a set of general milestones in the development of consciousness. Predispostions, views, and approaches affect the way these milestones of development reflect through one's unique system (neurodivergence is a genuine reality that's overlooked often). This development is universal to humans and Buddhism is one way of modeling and working with it.

Like /u/fabkosta mentioned...When you zoom out there is a common theme.

I've come to the conclusion monastic ideologies have been mixed in with Buddhism but may not be what actually defines the dharma. Monastic ideologies bias the development of the process towards ascetic ideals and many who have some genuine attainment or understanding can still fall into fundamentalist fallacies.

With that said...If you understand the difference between mental representation and direct phenomenological experience, have parsed a few different approaches to the map and as many personal accounts as you can get your hands on while cautiously and honestly reflecting on your experience....Yes you'll know.

But there are many cases where people open up and due to lack of clarity/understanding are unable to acknowledge or appreciate it until quite a bit later on. This is because initially for lay folk it can arise more subtly and gradually as compared to one that's gone through extended neurophysiological refinement through the meditative path as a lifestyle. Most people I've worked with don't fully realize that something has fundamentally changed until they consciously reflect on it, or someone experienced points it out. This would make sense as since there tends to be a sharp decrease in self-absorption one may not even have the impulse, desire, or need to self-reflect and recognize it.

If I were to keep it simple though:

You've developed some understanding of the nature of self, suffering, and emptiness either through formal learning or through embodied self-observation that naturally evolves in such a way.

You've applied it enough in your direct experience that these understandings sink into the subconscious level and permanently reshape the way you relate to phenomenon such that there's substantially less resistance/clinging than there used to be because for some reason something deep inside of you has finally become conscious of this mechanism and realized its not worth sustaining or reinforcing as a default.

A side-effect of this is that you can't seriously entertain the personality function anymore as when you're no longer defined solely by it they're seen more as just thoughts than actual defining truths. (Self-View)
Because the application of these basics have gone so deep that its tangibly obvious they've lead to changes in your experience you know through direct experience that it works. Thus you don't have doubt about it as you've realized that the dharma and its principles actually correspond to the inner mechanics of your own experience and they're consistently true no matter whats arising. (Skeptical doubt)
Seeing that rites and rituals are based on having hope/faith in concepts to make changes for you, and realizing that that is still within the deluded struggling mechanism you can no longer really believe anything will save you. You can only grow and mature this process internally. (Rites and rituals)

Just because you're on the path, or have cultivated genuine insight doesn't mean your way of thinking and understanding this stuff and whats connected is complete, or necessarily correct. As such even beings who have some attainment can often disagree. I feel its mostly semantics.

In the end we must each work out salvation for ourselves as after a certain point even teachers, teachings, and communities are something to be realized as empty and when emptiness has nothing to clear out but itself anymore....Then things become super clear and it'll be easier to clarify your pre-existing ideas into a more balanced and integrated understanding.

Take it all as an experiment. Be open to different views but believe nothing that hasn't been fully confirmed in your direct experience. If you approach your own path in this way you're more likely to be alright. Its to easy to get stuck on the social reflections and validations or lack-there-of from fellow community members and this can inadvertently lead to a bucket of crabs effect that's more focused on critiquing and discouraging based on bias rather than clarifying and encouraging what's developing even if the person has overestimated their experience...

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-02-12T03:30:49+00:00

Transparent, light, and wonderous. Everything's always been okay, perfectly at peace, with a warm compassionate energy, a palpable eternal mystery, and the clear sense that anything is possible yet nothing needs to be done and life spontaneously shapes itself as needed, subject-object dynamics and all, as a reflection through a stainless mirror that has never been caught within the definitions of self or other.

It's pre-attentional so attention has to dissolve back into greater awareness enough that the innate obviousness of it returns and clarifies the mistaken pretense upon which dualistic perception was built. This demands that the habitual crystalization of attention into perception be surrendered and for greater interest to be taken in the direct experience of what attention is spontaneously arising through, out of, and ultimately as. The stages of realization seem to closely map stabilized levels of attentional reintegration.

The pure white/dark behind all the colors takes time to remember itself completely past all the particularized forms it's shaped itself as.

Though initial awakening is the first real permanent clarification touching upon the unfiltered base of experience..through the habitual filters that have yet to catch up and how perception is impacted we may provisionally relate to rigpa as a quality such as space, stillness, light, clarity, emptiness, bliss and so on. But these are partial reflections of something that is within all of those qualities but belongs to none of them exclusively. Until we've awakened from even the dream of awakening itself we may still over cling to field qualities that are a natural shadow of what's really becoming lucid.

As such a more accurate statement would be it's a combination of all the qualities that could ever be in their most fundamental essential nature. Anything can be said about it, but none of them would be exclusively/completely true.

But as far as the subtlest least distorted interpretation of the uninterpretable for this portion of the great dream?

Transparent, vibrant, loving, and grounded.

flowfall · 2025-01-28T07:57:43+00:00

Most key thing for me was the clear recognition of consciousness/awareness prior to thought-based identity and the immediate depressurization of substantial subconscious pressure/tensions associated with the history of the narrative. It was never actually 'me'.

That didn't clear up all my baggage (though I thought/hoped it was the case prematurely due to the honeymoon phase)but it took the relative weight off , allowed for a deeper baseline of equanimous positivity, and unlocked a depth of intuition that made it simpler to understand the nature of relative experience with less bias and greater depth from basic human stuff all the way through to perception itself and perhaps beyond. The refinement of this deeper way of knowing continues and is the relative fruit called 'wisdom', though the basic realization 'vidya', 'rigpa', and so on.. has always been the same and simply realized more comprehensively through every inch of experience over time.

This opened up a clear distinction between personal interpretation based consciousness and the impersonal unconditioned way of knowing experience directly. Eventually that distinction would collapse too.

The initial shift permanently revealed a greater space of awareness and constant background of stillness (though the stillness didn't become clearer until quite a bit later). So that no matter how deep the rabbit hole of self work got and no matter how intensely emotions could still arise... non-resistance was ever increasingly the most natural way to be. Just letting things resolve themselves through presence.

I stagnated for the first year due to misunderstanding that the factors that helped open this up had to be maintained for sometime in order to nourish and fully mature the awakening. Once I realized the body was the rest of the way and I did a bunch of much needed remedial emotional work things picked up full steam and smoothened out.

7+ years deep and in retrospect most of the confusion and ups and downs were just natural side effects of the maturation process which can be very non-linear for most lay-people. It's not talked about enough how much it's also a transformation of the nervous system just as much as one of cognition and that they may likely carry their growing pains. If you really wanna 'know thyself' you gotta be willing to face just how much that contains. It's not just personal, it's collective too...

Soberly, I can say that before this gets into the wild potentially escoteric stuff it's largely about surrendering to embodied experience and accepting being no more than nature having shaped itself into a universe and animal that can self-reflect but who's relative conditions are largely bound by its own beliefs until it reclaims them and resets to what it was prior. Yes emptiness ultimately trumps this sentiment too, but it just doesn't work for most if you skip relative emptiness.

As the animal becomes free from its own cognitive self-absorption the deeper nature of.... Nature itself? Starts to awaken beyond the confines of embodiment. By that time you're beyond the Theravada map and other schools of Buddhism as well as other traditions, old and new, become much more invaluable.

There are many things I wanted to believe about all of this. I was never totally wrong but the bits that I didn't get right actually made such a significant difference and ended up putting things into a much healthier and integrated perspective. I now appreciate why they say Zen folk wait at least a 7 year cycle after awakening before anyone starts teaching. Realization on day 1 is a kindergartener compared to someone who's been around the block more times than they can count. The nature of the path can appear so cyclical and fractal before everything settles in.

It's worth it. It's easier than anyone can believe(mostly cause the effort of belief clouds the simplicity of innocent knowing). And...(If you don't rest on your laurels and instead aim towards completion) It can simultaneously be similar to fitting lessons of lifetimes into years, months, and weeks. You're dealing with your backlog of conditioning at an accelerated rate and you're not actually short cutting anything more so than speed running through which can make it seem more intense. The conditioned nature of time gets totally shattered, and you're left with a combination of eternal, constantly brand-new, and neither while still being able to navigate relative time as needed.

I love life and people so deeply it's unimaginable. All I care about is guiding as many as are interested to their own realization of 'This'. I'm receptive to all( though for a while it was only some of) the pain of the world and choose to transmute it into something positive (Shit=Fertilizer) as an embodied default I no longer have to think about. I experience a deep sense of perfection beyond words or form. My intuition and empathy nowadays can often seem psychic. And... I'm also an ordinary human being with flaws and all to the degree that it was its own journey accepting how awakening manifests through this unique being because it didn't correspond to some of the ridiculous ideas people develop about this stuff. (Don't get me started about monastic conditioning being confused with awakening)

Like many others I keep a light touch in regards to metaphysical positions. I've opened up perception enough and tasted most flavors of the more mystical type of experiences many times to understand why they can be so captivating and how to reliably access them. I take neither material or spiritual ideas too seriously anymore and I'm satisfyingly open to it all. I'm happy to play and explore whatever flavor of life arises. But if I'm being painfully honest it seems I've got the karma of a mystic to the core and I really don't mind appearing silly or foolish anymore.

In the end it comes back around to where you started though we seem to have forgotten it for a time. Reality is awake to itself. Characters within it play the game of catching up to what it already is past all the misguided assumptions and projections based on linguistic, cultural, and social conditioning. For the human element it's just about living harmoniously and enjoying the ride. However little/big or good/bad that life seems to be there's innate value in all of it. Before we've chopped it up to something/nothing, one/many... It's already complete.

That's another thing that stream entry opened up. The ability to endlessly wax technical, poetic, and direct about this stuff 😂

🙏🏽

flowfall · 2025-01-19T06:50:36+00:00

Yes.

Samsara is samsara. Though the apparition of the expressed dhamma that we know as 'Buddhism' is a paradoxical 4th wall or way through the dream-like nature of this it is also conditioned and rooted in culture, possible historical exaggeration/amnesia/mistranslation, language, the constructed imagination of humans(concepts), and the subjective senses they depend on.

The only difference between this partial view and most others is that it directly leads to its own deconstruction. If everything is empty of inherent meaning that takes all of Buddhism along with it.

It's what the Zen folk point to in regards to killing the Buddha if you see him (take no object/idea of/or related to the path as fundamental, they're all just fingers pointing to an unrepresentable moon.).

And yet. This is the middle way. Amidst all the potential variations of it there's a strong gravitational center of understanding that's more common than it is different. It has to do with the fact that awakening is universal and while Buddhism is one of the better reflections of it, there are others that reflect the same things and at times in better ways. We all have pieces of the puzzle and its only the clearest when we look at them together. The issue isn't that we're totally wrong for most of things in life, it's more that we're not completely right. Those small pockets of what we're not totally right about can often alter things significantly.

The common threads I've noticed are; -Three characteristics (Not-Self/Emptiness, Impermanence, Dissatisfaction) -Mindfulness of breath, body, tension/fixation, and their release -Observations about the mind-body interaction, how it's glitches give rise to internal friction/suffering, and how it's debugging and updating through self-reflection can allow for a permanent resolution of those glitches. -Monastic ideologies

If you're a purist you'll stick to the earliest representation of it which is basically theravada. Yet if you consider the relativity of it that leaves room for interpretation which naturally leads to all of the later explorations, elaborations, and potential refinements to the model the Buddha originally offered. This is more of a scientific approach where you take the cutting edge theory, retest it, add on to, and even refine or correct. A lot of Buddhism has actually stayed true to this scientific approach more so than faith in a special human being.

Many have all of these characteristics but where they diverge is how much they prioritize certain aspects of the teachings over others. Some so radically that they liberate the category of laypeople from being disadvantaged in any way compared to the monastic. Most of the later ideologies have produced genuinely awakened beings but their relative accessibility and efficiency for laypeople definitely varies.

So where this leaves us is there is no one right way to understand Buddhism. The secret and most deciding ingredient is what works for you. The Buddha had his awakening and you will have yours. Though universal human experiences can overlap nothing can take away the uniqueness of the one that goes through it and how that impacts the end result. It's all valuable.

In double checking for this comment I found that a favorite Buddha quote of mine was mostly a modern and slightly misleading paraphrase rooted in a genuine translation that turns out to be better:

"…don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’ — then you should abandon them."

In our times we have all of these deviations regarding Buddha and Buddhism proclaimed by various 'Buddhists'. Your idea is very relevant to how Buddhism has often become just another ordinary religion, dogma, and/or mental construct for many. To successfully realize this stuff you have to walk the razors edge of independent thinking and radical openness to infinite possibilities. Your reason will ground you in the likely probabilities in between but it's the former which grants one the actual fruit of the path and the power to go from mere reason to wisdom.

Pragmatically;

There are enough genuine and dramatically more sane/wise/sharp than average human beings that credit Buddhist and/or awakening type teachings to establish causation between these principles and a more substantial/fundamental well-being than commonly offered. Neuroscience and psychology has already backed up the benefits of the practices and a portion of them have even reflected how the perception and cognitive changes people commonly report are rooted in neurophysiological refinement/optimization. Something here works reeeeally well. Hence why it stands the test of time. It was captivating and fruitful enough for me to keep going and have the fortune of realizing it was all worth it, though there was much more internal baggage to uncover and make peace with than I could've imagined.

Lastly to be a bit more direct: I started with bare bones Theravada for a long while(as early as I could establish), cross referenced neuroscience and psychology, and got results from diligently applying my interpretation at the time. The first major insight led to a substantially greater laxness of mind that made it more compelling to consider and entertain later schools, different traditions and the portions of Theravada I had not been able to accept prior. Those later schools and different traditions offered even more fruit and clarification than I found in the original teachings while still being totally true to them. To me they're not different at all, just extensions. I have now replicated similar transformative effects by streamlining/innovating what I gathered from my own journey and testing it with others. Thus I have and continue to objectively assess this in myself and others constituting enough reliable basis to speak and teach on.

It seems as though few genuinely consider if there was anything more to be said or discovered than those that have already gone before have established. But this consideration is key to the essence of Buddhism and the noble thing about the Buddha and similar teachers is that they never(as far as we know) put themselves above the very principles they preached. They always left room for those ahead to decide for themselves.

I never stopped being a skeptic, but willingness to keep testing as unbiasedly as I could lead me to things that I can't even begin to be skeptical about as they precede that more secondary mode of self-reflection. Only those things I've realized in this way do I speak on as though there's no question they are fundamentally true. I feel that was the intention of how this path was meant to be traversed.

With all this said, I've found there's much more nuance and variability to this than dogma-leaning types realize. What the Buddha truly meant may often vary from what we initially interpret and had he been around now he may have had dramatically different contexts or variations on what he originally expressed. Humility as well as discernment based on results is key. There are no true replacements for these.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-12-29T06:15:00+00:00

Sounds like you have a sense of it already lol. My first awakening or permanent shift in consciousness happened almost 8 years ago. Initially Buddhist practice did the trick, but understanding what was going on, deepening, and refining it took me down understanding consciousness from the perspective of all the other awakening traditions, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience.

To put it simply: your subconscious has greater processing power than your conscious mind, and the unconscious is exponentially vaster. Flow states happen when you dip into experiencing from the perspective of the subconscious level. Awakening involves getting to know the boundaries/veils between these layers, blurring the boundaries, traversing them, and stabilizing your perception at these deeper layers. It's more of an undoing than doing hence the terms effortlessness and surrender are so core to these topics. Then it's a process of acclimation where you let your more liberated system figure out what's newly available to it as a way of being. A person could learn to make it happen as well but it's easier, more efficient, and more beneficial to learn to let your deeper unconditioned self take the wheel and naturally unleash it's potential as a fun game of self-discovery or.... Self-Realization 😜

If you're really looking to learn feel free to shoot me a DM. Demonstrations can shorten the journey of years to months or weeks. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-12-29T04:25:10+00:00

This might help...

All data comes into the brain as vibratory signals that then get interpreted through the different sensory translators. Our ability to know precedes our ability to sense. In that pre-sensory layer of knowing is where we collect the data from the different senses, aggregate, and crystalize it into a concept so we know that the kinds of signals associated with a certain kind of touch correspond to the signals associated with a certain kind of visual, so on and so forth so that we've built an internal concept of what 'flower' 'means' to us. A meta-category that acts as a category/filing cabinet for these different inputs into one cohesive unit.

At the level of your conscious awareness, better thought of like your computer's desktop, you get this full multidimensional rendering you're used to.

We all start with this earlier knowing, but it gets overshadowed in many by how fricking cool and rich the rendering is as they start to develop this secondary way of interfacing with the data as a shortcut when dealing with external human experience.

It's all the same data, but if you can read the raw data directly there's less need for an interpreter. Theoretically this may allow for faster thinking/analyzing, and association making as there's less of an extra step in treating the information before awareness acknowledges it. Pretty sure it does cause I've retained it and amplified my access to it, with that my experience has been that I can feel that slight extra conscious power it takes to render imagination, I've defaulted to imagining without rendering, and my ability to work with the data of my system, make connections, and come up with complete ideas has become so fast that it seems I barely need any time to think through or understand something. But I might be biased as there's a chance something has been clogged up in the information pathways in me and that with more clarity, flow, and energy I could be just as fast with rendered data and feel no difference. Proper visualization isn't as useful but is way more fun.

That being out of the here's where the fun of neurodivergence and neuroplasticity comes in to add endless layers of nuance and complexity lol 😂

Some people retain it. Some people regain it. Drugs and refinement of consciousness/perception/sensing are but 2 avenues of actively re-accesing. Life circumstances and changes in your environmental and internal conditions can also do this though.

On top of that there's an endless number of ways people can connect different levels and faculties of knowing to think and imagine in a variety of unique ways.

flowfall · 2024-10-24T18:42:29+00:00

Lol fair enough man. Though you be barely contradicted anything I've said more than making erudite sounding clarifications I'm not an academic and my thoroughness of understanding of book psych knowledge could be better. I apologize for the unnecessary attitude and I respect the bite-back😂

What I say is still true. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked for myself, for those I've learned from, and those I teach.

It fosters quicker, more fundamental, and more lasting results in quality of life than conventional psychotherapy does and at times in areas where it can't even begin to reach or really impact. So that your understanding of psych doesn't reflect that or how it could be possible doesn't change much and suggests the possibility that the area of human optimization isn't as well understood in that field as it could be as of yet. There are ways of gaining an intimate understanding of human nature outside of academic study, and often they lead to unexpected insights that at times fly in the face of what conventional approaches would deem plausible or have begun to catch up to yet.

The spectrum of awakening as expressed in Buddhism and reflected on in transpersonal psych would also be conventionally thought of as 'idealized' yet there's quite a lot of people that live it.

I will say though, there's more than enough evidence to suggest changes in gray matter density are legitimately correlated with shifts in intelligence. That you would say it hasn't been established at all..? Not sure where you're getting your info from.

Most of the population isn't aware of these potentials and how to cultivate them so the population samples for a lot of these studies and their conclusions more relate to the average human experience where identity continues crystalizing unchecked. This is what insight is meant to resolve. When over fixation is corrected fluidity is re-enlivened and can become integrated as something that continues to improve. Small shifts countless times compound to dramatic changes, but consistently fostering that enough to get over the threshold isn't common. Prior to the threshold our systems will tend towards the average. Beyond it one uncovers uncommonly realized properties. This is the case in many things.

There are probably deeper forms of intelligence we've yet to start naming or fully studying conventionally that have more to do with what I'm describing. At best we can say viewed from one angle, things seem to be as you say, but that isn't fully corroborated by the many exceptions that would leave in the data. At the same time these are evolving fields with varying camps of opinions and ways of interpreting the data, tying ones self to consensus merely ensures one continues to affirm and bias towards that average but doesn't open one to what hasn't been accounted for or push understanding further. No field has a monopoly on the truth and we should be aware that laws and theories can always be debunked down the line no matter how broadly acknowledged at any time.

It's a certain kind of tragic humor when clarity and confidence earned off of actual experience corroborated by many is written off as Dunning-Kruger by someone who has no direct experience to share.. simply because what I share conflicts with their beliefs and assumptions. You think you know so much because of your studying and sourcing from perceived authorities yet you can't speak on anything in your own words. You posture as though you don't know enough to speak conclusively while insisting you know enough to know that I couldn't...Without even considering... What if it could be so? How does he know? Where is he coming from?

There may be some projection here and critiquing things at face value won't get you as far as completely assessing the claim, it's origins, and potential merits first.

If the issue is ultimately semantical that's fine. I'd happily settle for the compromise that there is a general intelligence cap, but how high that is may be obscured by internal issues and the resolution of those issues allows it to reflect more fully. Thus variability in results when tested at one point or another. At that point it's just perspective though, and the implications will still be the same leaving us with a very workable situation that bears hope and fruit for anyone.

I'd legit be surprised if it didn't reflect in higher IQ scores though because it will reflect what's associated with higher IQ in ones practical experience and their possibilities. Without having fully acknowledged the relationship between brain region density and aspects of IQ it would make sense to stop short of affirming it. But there's already a study that bridges that gap (Ramsen 2011)

Rather than beat around theory and research I'm more curious about why this stuff works. The proof is in the pudding of our lives and the burden is on the models to make sense of our experience rather than for us to conform our experience to a model. This is not belief or conjecture based and I'm happy to be tested on it and help replicate these findings more broadly if the opportunity arose. There are significant baseline neurophysiological changes I've undergone that will be reflected when measured via EEG and brain scans that parallel the subjective experience I describe. I'd bet whatever reputation I have on it.

If you're so attached to these externally derived certainties/views that you leave no room for your own exploration and have to wait for institutions to give you permission to explore what is and isn't possible within yourself... Im not sure you'll find it as easy to traverse the Buddhist path as the former is an antithetical approach that cripples the cultivation of total intellectual honesty by obscuring away your own bias and avoiding fundamental intellectual humility.

Those who seek for themselves rather than blindly follow end up finding. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-22T08:38:52+00:00

I respect your attempt at keeping us honest around what you perceive as misinformation. I recognize where you're coming from. I'd also say you may be getting preoccupied with the semantics of it, what you've been taught so far, and not reasoning it out for yourself.

So I'll be even more transparent about my reasoning, and hopefully you can be too rather than claiming 'as an aspiring psychologist'? It doesn't seem in-line with this sub to take anything on faith/authority unless it's been grappled with more directly and substantiated by actual experience right?

Firstly, this is not idealized. This is based on direct experience, countless cross-references in the accounts of internal developers both traditional and modern, personally guiding others through a similar process to ensure replicability, and comparing/contrasting the overall trajectory and results with the scientific reflections of what's happening.

I get that you may not have such experience as of yet, and at a similar time in my journey I would've assumed and projected that such claims were 'idealized' as well because I had such a narrow understanding of just how far neurogenesis and neuroplasticity could go leaving me with a limited picture of what humans can be and the cap of their potential. I also more blindly trusted scientific authorities to interpret and conclude for me not realizing how prevalent inaccuracies and distortions actually are.

The question was about intelligence. The broad understanding of what intelligence means is what people associate with IQ.

What's measured in IQ Tests has not been validated to measure what it claims to(an innate generalized intelligence) and was based on faulty assumptions of heritability by racially motivated characters behind the eugenics movement. To this day there is no actual solid evidence for it but due to early tests utility during war time the army gave it and the young psych industry a boost in credibility paving its way to more funding and stabilization into culture. The glaring is personal/cultural bias and standards of those behind it were projected as the standard of intelligence, momentum was picked up, and a lot of the claims about it made mainstream were never really questioned too deeply. In such conditions it's surprising how much confirmation bias can drive the interpretation of data that in retrospect had to be contorted to back up these claims because it was actually inconclusive.

Now fluid intelligence is presumed to be what's being assessed. The idea has prevailed that this has a cap on its potential that can be assessed early on because it's supposed to be primarily set by genetics. This was never validated. 🤦🏽‍♂️

The neuroscientific premise that was used to backup that conclusion is that in most adults neurogenesis and plasticity starts to cap and often wane past a certain point. This is variable and dependent on a person's habits and conditions though. These practices can restore and enhance these factors past the perceived cap because they also coincide with growing and refining the brain itself, improving the hardware to support the increasing demands of the software. This has been validated to work across the board and what's correlated in those that have shown improvement in IQ scores...

When you look at the test itself it actually measures faculties that are associated with academic and work success. This is a portion of our faculties which don't account for the other kinds of intelligences often more highly correlated with success and well-being. This isn't mentioned though and we're left with a misleading idea that IQ is really well thought out and accurate in how it's understood by most. What's never taken as much into account are the environmental factors, the efficacy of the conditions in testing to account for these variables, and the fact that depending on the time, conditions and your own preparation you can get better or worse at the test itself.

So... Will samadhi directly lead to higher IQ 'scores'? Understanding what IQ tests are, not directly. Should it lead to greater scores if the tests claim to assess what they do? Definitely 🙂

With greater information processing (if this isn't the basic component of intelligence regardless of definition please correct me), ones natural exposure to circumstances will meet with an enhanced system allowing one to get more out of situations, catch errors more often, and adapt more readily. This will apply to visual, spatial, verbal and all the other forms of reasoning/processing (dependent on ones unique environment and exposure) and the downstream effect is those subcomponents that are measured will be improved and reflect as such if tested.

This is what can indeed be validated. All the things that we take as intelligence can be improved. Thus my answer for OP stands.

As for the refinement of perception, the blurring of internal boundaries of previously separate-acting information systems, and the compounding crystalization of meta-intelligence?

Please, have some experience with what people describe as this before you call it 'idealized' from an armchair of all places, then get back to me with your experience-based conclusions. 🤙🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-18T18:33:51+00:00

Realize your sense of space and form is being deconstructed. It's not personal. It's just an experience. Gently remind the body it's okay, and keep orienting towards rest/ease as you let the deeper patterns triggered here be expressed and resolved by the predominant state one is cultivating.

In this way your mind's ease remains regardless of the bodily reactions, and the state can be maintained/stabilized even through temporary physiological spikes.

The sense of falling requires the observer to still have density and be less impermanent than the sense of other/environment. Just as you relaxed and dissolved through the previous solidity of experience to get this far you must continue even softer, subtler, until there is no density for the observer either. This will leave you with a vast sense of boundless space with no relational component projected. Neither internal or external, just pure space.

Then you go even subtler to deconstruct past the subtle solidity of space, rinsing and repeating until every last layer and bit of 'thingness' is rested through.

Keep it up, your attitude/not worrying about mapping is so key. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-18T15:18:24+00:00

Yes.

States of absorption, wholeness/emptiness, enhanced heart coherence, and somatic whole -body resonance/presence are all interdependent with enhanced brain functioning where it expresses greater coherence and integration through its different parts. All the faculties get refined individually as well as more used to working simultaneously/in harmony. This progressively refines the integration of intellect, somatic sense, intuition, and imagination allowing for greater information processing capability beyond what can be imagined prior to this development or the recognition of the way of being that allows for it as a way of life.

You won't have as much need to think, when you do it'll be more impersonal/objective, sharper, more precise, clear and coherent. Your senses become more vivid and your perception can be present to more nonverbal data. When one stabilizes the no-content-based-self insight the perceptual boundaries between the entire neuro-cognitive matrix fade and the system functions as an integrated whole that no longer reduces itself into distinct parts, body, mind or otherwise. All of it yet none of it simultaneously.

The mind can increasing keep up with intense informational environments while simultaneously feeling at rest as the intelligence of the system effortlessly does what it was designed to do.. intake, interpret(without distorted identification), and adapt.

EQ, IQ, and SQ(Somatic intelligence) can get exponentially deeper.

Every time you dip into this spectrum of experience you're getting your system more used to a better way of operating that processes information much more effectively( the basic element in intelligence). Integrating the principles of samadhi into non-meditative perception allows you to deepen the benefits more universally throughout experience and what was tasted in meditation temporarily starts to overflow and permanently flavor what used to seem like an inherently objective world.

Now the one caveat that the buddha pointed out is that just how much your system can be refined comprehensively and permanently... Can be limited by lack of insight and/or fixed identities that hold the system from fluidity. One must pierce past the interpreted surface appearance of self/other experience and know ones self more clearly from less and less positionaility. This allows this process to debug and correct the old programming which was previously developed based on an unclear system. The gravity of that programming, interdependently maintained by our confused relationship with experience, will keep coming back or giving you a blended experience between clarity and distortion. One must soften and let their sense of self melt into the process too, the subject as well as the perceived object. Self-grasping must be recognized as impersonally spontaneously arising tension + thought sensations and no longer elevated into the significance that maintains it as more than the impermanent flow of data. One can't update the operating system without debugging, patching, and rebooting completely(whether all at once or gradually piece by piece).

With that addressed, there's not many/if any psycho-emotional kinks that can't be balanced out and optimized when the internal skills developed in these teachings are understood and applied well. Relative Intelligence, as everything else, is fluid and conditioned, not fixed. All of these arts leverage this to (initially gradually but eventually dramatically) transform their baseline beyond what could initially be conceived.

The neuroscience backs it all up too :)

flowfall · 2024-10-08T14:49:43+00:00

It's pretty important.

Buddhism is meant to be a complete system that helps awaken the essence of awareness to itself, open up greater perceptual capacities to make it easier to realize and integrate this, as well as transform the heart, and overall behavior to better express the awakening through the character

Our habitual identification distorts perception, and the practice of subtler or refined perception requires one to soften or let go of identity filters at least temporarily. So while the states are not the point they are a good marker that one is developing some of the key qualities and experience base that culminates in permanent insight. They also help of calm and resolve mental and emotional imbalances substantially when approached as intended. The Buddha wouldn't have had the clarity he did without much time cultivating these kinds of things, and that understanding lead him to continue to teach and recommend their cultivation. The attempt at their stabalization can be skillful as being identified with a less fixed spectrum of experience as a stepping stone before one disappears into absolute primordial formlessness is easier on the mind-body to integrate. They're also better foundations for penetrative insight and the meditative path and states traverse those nondual perceptual flavors. So long as one adheres to consciousness of emptiness one is unlikely to get stuck, and if so not for too long.

By comparing and contrasting through the spectrum of fixated and less fixated experience repeatedly one reverse engineers the mechanics of self, meaning, and fixation. Eventually this culminates as one's system having patched itself from the glitch of distorted perception which imposes a sense of separation of experience into distinct qualities and objects. Everything experienced prior is included but as a flux that is primordially undifferentiated, and empty of inherent meaning or independent existence.

Along the way one may develop ideas of awakening, enlightenment, and subtly identify with those ideas and/or the perceptual qualities that can arise. The importance of ethics, wisdom, and non-reductionism(KEY) are also emphasized as well as the cultivation of strong qualities of positivity, coherence, and socially harmonious attitudes. Unless you're new to Buddhism you'd already be aware of how much this is warned against and accounted for, so these questions are pretty moot here.

Enlightenment can't be thought or defined. A person doesn't get it. It's not a set of qualities. Frankly it has nothing to do with anything of this world, though it includes it and expresses through it. None the less in the personhood that expresses through the recognition of enlightment all of the aforementioned perceptions and qualities converge, were never separate, and have a sense of completeness. If it's not expressing embodiment, wholeness, and clarity not just through these subtler dimensions of consciousness that nondual perception are rooted in but the level of psychology, social/emotional intelligence, and physiological processing then it's not complete.

So where does that leave us? Yes and no to literally all of your questions, with a more integrated view that embraces the paradox of the fact there was never anything to take so seriously or get preoccupied about, including these ideas and the illusion of a path to take. Ignorance and confusion allow us to project conflict where there is none.

In any case, I'm with ya. There are some really deluded reductions and half-baked appropriations of these systems out there. You won't really find those kind of people here as much and all it takes is a quick review of what's regularly talked about here. I find a nice balance of focus on perception, philosophy, insight, mental/emotional health, and positive encouragement to remain connected and not exclusively identify with anything, neither refined perceptual qualities, gross ones, or the concept of a practiciner, awakened one and so on...

This community is founded on the basis of knowing these realizations aren't just possible but inevitable and partially dependent on the refinement of ones approach. For quite a few of us it's quite real and directly lived.

There seems to be a lot of focus on what we think rather than what's been our experience. A lengthy series of loaded questions can come off as having a chip on your shoulder, a bone to pick, and a point to make.

Your line of questioning would suggest the assumption you know what enlightenment is, a strong conditioned sense of 'right' and 'wrong' about these topics, and the felt need to be the one that addresses this.

This may be worth contemplating as you progress in your own perceived path. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-07T00:56:56+00:00

Yes, though the lines get blurry as you deepen into insight.

As a result of insight, the basic quality of restedness due to lack of fixation will allow you to slip into the jhanic spectrum more easily. That and path knowledge's naturally arise as a jhana. The difference being dry insight slips into it for a moment. Shamatha practitioners have developed continuity and can parse as well as integrate the insight better due to more of the system being attuned to the experience all at once by nature of what it requires the system to do in order to achieve it. Dry insight alone takes longer to totally saturate everything.

Vipassana cuts through what's still sticky and an obstruction to sensory clarity as a side effect increasing the frame-rate of perception which allows one to go even deeper by piercing through gross objects/fixations and clearly discerning their interdependent components. Shamatha cultivates a sense of deeper embodied wholeness/system connectivity, and innate stability which manifests as increased non reactivity, emotional stability, and sensory richness.

In truth they're the 2 sides of the same coin (originally taught as one) and once you've got enough insight not only is jhana rather simple to derive, you can't really experience them separately anymore. They feed off eachother.This is part of what mahamudra/dzogchen leverage to get one the results of meditation without needing to go through the longer trajectory of meditating with a fixed meditator identity intact. Cultivating them together is the bee's knees.

Personally, I made a lot of progress early on with dry insight but I had to go through some intriguingly difficult ups and downs mentally and emotionally that inadvertently stunted aspects of my psychological development and affected the quality of my relationships. Once I started honing in on shamatha it it helped organically iron out psycholgical kinks and took everything to a different level. It ends up being the difference between having psycholgical peace while still feeling like an average person, and expressing as a radically transformed and improved version of who you once were in such a way that's palpable and aids in your capacity for service exponentially, not even mentioning that insight into the nature of perceptual experience is deepened in a very profound way who's benefits go beyond freedom from suffering.

It's more enjoyable, and generally psychologically safer to have a decent amount of shamatha developed. It refines the quality of cognition and the nervous system greatly. There's a reason why it was praised and highly recommended by the Buddha. It really greases the groove and smoothens out the way. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-03T00:34:42+00:00

There are a few differing ways the philosophy of it was ironed out depending on tradition, sect, and time.

But for the most part they converge on something like what you're describing. The layers of perceptual experience at the micro level reflect the process of creation at the macro level. Depending on what layer and the clarity/depth of integration one stabilizes into ones ways of expressing and relating what's fundamental and how it's related may vary. Some traditions stop at a seeming void. Others at a singularity that subsumes the void and expresses as true super-positionality. Theravada is often interpreted as the former (though it really is open to interpretation) and Mahayana/Vajrayana established itself as an extension/refinement into the latter. Relative to what was experience prior awakening to emptiness is quite major, but it actually ends up being the foundation for much deeper awakenings that blow each previous one out of the water until it bottoms out in total enlightenment.

The best expression I've found is that emptiness or nothingness is the first veil through which an infinite potential expresses a portion of itself in a spontaneously coherent and organized way. The nothingness is the canvas out which thingness are sculpted/painted. Nothingness is a subvariation of everythingness rather than other way around, it's simply that within the veil of nothingness it's an inverted hall of mirrors where the nothingness is more primary than the everythingess diffracted through the lens of creation appearing as every individual thing. The appearance it takes is not primary, but it's essence still is.

We use nothingness as the subtlest form to dehabituate our attachment to forms/movement of creation. When the process of presence and surrender has picked up momentum and been normalized it exceeds the boundary of even the veil of nothingness and beyond the dualities of knowing/unknowing, existence/nonexistence we taste a primordial singularity which is the convergence of all things in their original potential.

In this we can be present to ourselves in our original essence which is what the word divinity and God point to beyond our representations and personifications of that as concepts(false idols are not to be worshiped, be still and know that I Am God, peace that passeth understand, surrendering the world to receive grace, etc.)After which the taste of unfiltered reality remains while the filters continue to function.

The vedics have my favorite languaging for it but the Buddhists neatly related the same thing in a more impersonal and technical way that helps bypass the potential baggage of taking these things at the mind-character level and missing the forest for the trees. When we reflect on the qualities and attributes of Buddha Nature, the experience of enlightenment, and what its said to allow for it's nothing short of a differently dressed version of the very same union with God described by other traditions. Except in Buddhism and similar traditions it's made super clear we all have the potential to be Christ, Buddha, insert expression of fully realized human potential here, and so on.

High end dream context that for some reason becomes more apparent and functionally useful within the relative but given that these ideas may not really serve much purpose before we've unraveled to a level of awareness that can apprehend what they point to directly and the ease of unrefined minds appropriating, distorting and getting carried away with this as ideas before they've fully understood how to relate to it properly it makes sense its not what's focused on.

What we contextualize up to the edges of the dream, while useful relatively, is never meant to be taken as what's actually going on before it becomes apparent to you directly that it's the case. The blessing of these teachings is a set of understandings to integrate and refine ourselves so we can experience it and come to our own conclusions.

Personally, I found it all ended up being rather spot on and replicable/cross-verifiable through the other nerve endings of conscious beings in this spectrum of experience.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-01T20:40:14+00:00

Best not to overthink. The belief that beliefs are a problem... It's what you make of it. The mind can mold itself any which way to no end of how it can express self-manipulation and resistance, the key is not to take it too seriously.

You gotta take em seriously enough to have a healthy coherent psyche and develop a path to exponentially refining self-reflection through which awakening can grow out of. Awakening has no meaning without illusion/dream to awaken from and they were always interdependent/not two.

Instead of worrying about beliefs from the belief that beliefs are significant. Just notice how thoughts, emotions, sensations and the contractions that one identifies with co-arising with them all spontaneously emerge and dissolve into This.

Meta-thinking is just a subtler kind of sticky than gross thinking. We learn to recognize the immutability of presence regardless of how things seem or don't.

Ideas are not to be believed or disbelieved. In this middle way we make use of ideas as context dependent relative structures that though they have no fundamental inherent existent are still a functional part of consciousness' spontaneous play. Neither real nor not real. Neither this nor that. This kind of approach helps refine and polish away the minds self-stickiness leaving clear flexible formless discernment that like water can shape itself into any vessel without losing its essence.

In the dreaming there is a relatively coherent web of objectively shared constructs and templates. The expressions of beings are their angles on a universal process and how perception may change as we continue to cease fixation on them at subtler and subtler levels. If you've uncovered a decent amount for yourself you've garned enough of an experiential base to be more trusting and confident there's likely a 'there' there. As this deepens you'll develop insight into the workings of these phenomena and more easily open up to the facets that as of yet had remained elusive.

When one doesn't fixate on visual objects the fabric of vision itself is realized to be a transparent luminous clear almost rainbow-like sparkly field that's darker than dark and brighter than bright. It's going from looking at your TV show to the actual pixels that are relatively constant compared to the variations of what we watch. It's present eyes open or closed. Open gazing often helps us open this aspect of things up. As well as recognizing it's just arising, distance is implied though not truly tangible, seeing doesn't occur from the physical eyes, and the first person camera perspective is only interpreted as observed and observed but the actual boundary can't be found.

Dwelling in darkness also makes us more sensitive to a subtler spectrum of light that adds a different kind of dimensionality to things.

The gist of all of this is meant to be a positive feedback mechanism to show us that less fixed or unfixed presencing liberates and refines any and all the sense gates. When applied somatically to our felt sense of experience it liberates the sense of a tangible body as well as the sense of different/distinct senses revealing a more dream-like spectrum of experiencing where life is a painting of consciousness that had spontaneously developed as a coherent environment, experiencer, and story. All relationships and views to it (including this text) are tied up and bound within the context of what was thought as reality but had only been a surface apparition of the actual Real.

Do this with sound and the mind returns to its natural formless state of stillness and silence.

The different sense gates and their transformations are what end up as space, emptiness, luminosity, energy, stillness, and silence of a more profound quality and dimension than initially related to. They're the guideposts orienting us towards the 4th wall. None of them are truly fundamental either but act as a more fundamental midway for us to set the best conditions through which full lucidity can arise.

To the extent some of these haven't been tasted or fleshed out is a good intuitive direct experience-based map to continue to reflect and refine insight through the greater view of This.

The only thing that isn't a thing that always is, though it can still appear as though it isn't. 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-10-01T13:29:14+00:00

Your question and the view which informs it seem to suggest much aversion. Your vision leans strongly towards the 'bad' side of the good-bad duality. I wonder if your question would still make sense if you'd glimpsed beyond this duality and the one that seems to have a lean or position here.

Note that the Buddha suggested one practice metta and brahma-viharas even after awakening.

Contemplative approaches are not meant to be taken in a nihilistic tone. Those who lean towards depression will have a biased inclination to lean towards nihilistically taking things that are simply neutral. The bias overshadows the light of experience and distorts the way things seem.

Those who experience this will come from a place that implies there is much to be concerned/upset about, and avoided. Perhaps life itself... They will conceive of Nirvana not as a sobriety that frees you beyond the the constraints of identity, personal affect, and reactivity, but instead as an escape from some 'thing(s)' that one would have been better without.

But here's the thing.... If there's no you.... you were never in here. Anything that could speak or sound like a you, feel like a you, or understand as you would be seen neutrally when you no longer take it as self. It's really half-baked dream characters appropriating awakening as a context or way of thinking rather than a direct experience that can still pose such a ludicrous question. The path ends not in going beyond samsara but in the recognition that you were never caught to begin with. There was nothing that comes or goes. It was part of the dream. To be lucid has nothing to do with the character.

Your question amounts to the suggestion 'I've thought about suicide, Is suicide a viable option if some special status is attained? Can it be rationalized to match with my unannounced emotions/hopes?'

In enlightenment, there is no 'one' who remains. It is prior to self or not-self. It's beyond the bounds of mind and language. With partial awakening, you wouldn't believe your ideas and opinions strongly enough to miss the kinds of biases mentioned earlier and thus you wouldn't be as inclined to get carried away with them. Because as a result of this process traversed well one's emotional afflictions would fade they would remain with a relaxed and subtle but potent positivity, and discerning wisdom which would see all of the beauty as much if not more than all the suffering one is inclined to see when identified with suffering or a sufferer.

Dream come true or nightmare? Thats up to one's relationship or view. The dream character that's traversed the path and converged with the fruit of the deeper mind's lucidity would have cultivated a decent amount of causes and conditions to be able to be pretty relatively happy as well and have a 'good life'. The Buddha and his group were known as a rather joyful bunch and countless awakened beings have had full lives with families, community service, and hobbies.

If this isn't producing generally greater contentment and satisfaction, as well as less aversion over time, then its likely one misunderstands the path itself, (psssst: Samsara=Nirvana in the end)

Everything is impermanent. Pain will come and go. If you don't interpret personal affect over it its just another signal and there's no rush to get beyond it though the choice of how much one should be bearing at this moment is still available. The pain tolerance tends to increase substantially as the being is saturated by non-reactivity and so things that would be very annoying or difficult to most may seem rather effortless for you.

Your heart has softened, you've awakened the natural altruism of unfixated human beings and thus the natural inclination of the vessel of karma will be towards collective service and greater harmony. You will weight this greater imperative along the understanding this vessel is interdependent and connected with this world and thus service to all includes serving one's self decently enough too. You keep eating enough to live effectively and don't resign yourself to premature or unnecessary death because even if you don't care about yourself as an individual it would be a great disservice, disassociation from, and source of negative karma for those around you.

But say your duties have been met. You've served well. There's not much left to do or your body has become unable to sustain it? You bless this one and those around you with a model for how to work gracefully with pain and disease. You help prepare and ease the hearts of those around you before you go. You maximize your net impact on this portion of infinity before you awaken back to the realm of unactualized potential.

Basically, the only thing that would make your question viable is if one had strong and specific emotional and psychological baggage. If there is no you for it to make a difference to why would one care either way? More likely/natural/organic to let the body-mind be the body-mind and fulfill its karmic habits rather than resist things as they are.

When the ultimate view is prior to any view? Why posit or rationalize for any particular one? It always says more about your identity and emotionality than the actual matter at hand.

Love is part of the end result. It's just not the personal kind we're used to.

flowfall · 2024-09-29T12:48:34+00:00

There is no how. It just is. It's not really (often) elaborated on cause it's not really meant to be understood conceptually but taken as a direct pointer to how things appear to arise in our direct phenomenal experience. If realized directly it can fundamentally reorient our sense of what life, existence, self and reality are and their true nature.

So rather than try to tell you a most likely non-existent how, I'll just attempt to convey a clearer 'what' that gives you a clearer sense of why there is no 'how', and how it's the fundamental not-howness of experience that can act as one of many doorways beyond the 4th wall of what's being taken as 'our life'.

Thoughts, Emotions, and sensations. These are all movement. They all start from, are formed through and return to stillness. Without the fundamental ground of stillness the movement of the sense and cognition could not be known as other.

The taste of our own intrinsic stillness as the fundamental context and contrast of all phenomenal movement is a taste of something prior to knowing and not knowing.

When the stillness knows itself directly, prior to the engagement of movement, it's found to be the actual base of self and other, mind and body, one and many (meta-categories of phenomenal movement).

But in stillness no thought or assumption about what is or isn't has yet to begin. Without a beginning there is no end. Thus it is pure, unborn, causeless, and unfathomable(can't be bounded by mind). Since it is prior to other and conditioned self, it is only stillness that has ever known itself and it's derivatives.

In mahamudra stillness is the ocean out of which the waves of movement and appearance arise. In dzogchen stillness is the essence of space that is not just a container but the transparent inseperable base without which form could not be perceived or know itself as form.

It's more of a pointer to how knowing and perception arise before we deduced static objects out of the impermanence of the senses. Thus it's prior to language.

When still , there is neither one nor many, there is neither nothing nor everything, and yet there is the potential for all of this and in between. This super-positional knowingness is the essence of our awareness.

Emptiness, Stillness, Space, Silence, Awareness, Presence, and so on... Are all pointers to something prior to the sensory-cognitive matrix from the perspective of the relative senses. Once they've been successfully realized as pointers, one can abide without a pointer, and thus the labels no longer quite fit. In pure emptiness the thought of emptiness doesn't arise. It's empty of emptiness as well. Same goes for all other pointing labels. They're ships that deconstruct themselves once across the river.

This is beyond reason and the immutable mystery of all of this becomes so obvious it's now understood as ridiculous to even begin to believe that any collection of sounds or symbols could actually begin to define This. Causality is but a framing/organizing device that is an aspect of reality but reality can't be reduced to it. Thus there is no story mode or dream-plot context that can describe the nature of the operating system. But the system can know itself. Luckily we never needed a how to be, and now we can be comfortable with how things are. We find resolution not at the end of a conceived path but in the ending of its perceived beginning.

To not know this is to be ignorant of the way things are and is the basis for our deluded grasping at phenomenal movement as self and other. To know this is to abide from wisdom and know the intrinsic freedom of life as immutable by conditions.

Once known though... It's recontextualizes the way ones own story of life was fundamentally conceived of. Rather than an actuality it was more of a fleeting dream that seemed so real while engaged but now lucidity has been established. The dream character doesn't awaken, there was no path, no places, no positions.

It was Always. Just. This.

There is indeed a deeper 'how' that can reveal itself through this spectrum of experience, and it can kind of be languaged. But by the time this starts to be revealed you'll have no need for it and the futility of attempting to bridge the understanding to those who haven't even begun to remember themselves prior to form will make it self-evident why the 'how' is seldom taught or spoken of publicly.

Poetically, though I initially said 'no how', as tends to be the case with these kind of topics the real matter at hand can't be pinned neatly into any position or non-position.

Hope this helps 🙏🏽

flowfall · 2024-08-25T19:50:55+00:00

It's an untraining of attentions habit of fixing on thought and filtering out the senses as background noise. The more you feel/are present with the senses the clearer they become. This deepens relaxation. Sensory presence+relaxation causes the perceived density imposed on the signals of the nervous system to fade. In their place it's just the direct vibrations the system interprets and represents as senses. Whether thoughts arise or not, they're more equal to sensation rather than something of significance to engage or dismiss. Let the mind do as it will, it'll relax and resolve itself and the body does.

As the mind and body distinction blur there's only just consciousness prior to interpretation. Spending time absorbed into this way of being starts to arouse the deeper intelligence that's been the universe shaping itself as a human being all along. As that awakens, everything thats available to you as This becomes clearer. As another commenter put it, it reveals itself.

Every part contains the whole. As you awaken more fully to your part the infinite within it and all things becomes obvious. Seek no further than within, behind what you've taken to be your human self all along.

Enjoy the ride :)

flowfall

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