Joseph Maynor
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Posts posted by Joseph Maynor
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1 hour ago, Orb said:
Where does the Self end and Maya begin?
That's the key question. Technically Maya doesn't begin because it doesn't exist. The changing doesn't exist, only the Unchanging. It is assumed the changing has something to do with the Unchanging because the Unchanging is concealed by the I-Thought and the mind. But a deeper pointer I think is to realize the not-Self but to abide in silence because trying to practice is no good because the Self is not a doer. That's sneaky ego anytime a pointer is considered or practiced. Really the pointers in Advaita Vedanta are only used to bring the I-Thought back into the Self where it can be dissolved. We feed the ego pointers so it can kill itself and then we go back to Self-abidance. But even that is a pointer because the real Bliss is when no mind is there and no attachments are there either. But here is where it's sneaky -- detachment is a pointer and shouldn't be clung to because that's the ego/mind. The practice in Advaita Vedanta is interesting because there is no practice. Silence and Bliss arise on their own when one is resting in the Self, resting in Truth. But even that is a pointer. But sometimes you can observe this and go this is what is being pointed to! It's an unattached detachment and an attached detachment; Maharshi uses the word silence and I think this is what he's driving at. You feed the ego enough theory to snuff itself out basically, but when silence is achieved, there's no more to do because the Self is not a doer or a results seeker. The philosophy is only a means to an end and has no Truth. But without the philosophy, the ego is always in the driving seat because it's not going to self-immolate. It's like a trojan horse. You have to feed ego food that causes it to want to snuff itself out.
This is what the teachings are basically doing and why they're considered scriptures in Advaita Vedanta. It's not knowledge because the Self is nondual and can't be realized through knowledge which stops at the mind/ego. So, technically the Self is not real or unreal. Saying the Self is real is a thought. But even saying the Self is nondual is a thought. But these thoughts ultimately fall away when Silence is achieved and there's a way to see and understand the illusion of the not-Self. So Maya is mistaken identification with the mind and with ego basically which have nothing to do with your True Identity and what is Real -- it's like mirages doubling down on mirages -- instead of realizing what's real is Me sitting in this car Witnessing these mirages and seeing through them as unreal when I get close enough to them. -
On 12/3/2023 at 8:55 AM, Alexander said:
You can transcend self but you are left with only Awareness there is.
And that is the Self. That nondual witness consciousness that is not a results seeker.Now to the OP’s post:
The Nature of Experience
In seeing, there is only the seen.
In hearing, there is only the heard.
In feeling, there is only the felt.
In cognition, there is only the cognized.=> There’s only the Self and these are all gross illusions of a material world.
When these factors of experience are understood as such, there is no one there. This alone is the end of suffering.=> The end of suffering is to realize that inner and outer experience is Maya and has nothing to do with the Self.
If you understand this, you don’t need to read further. Enjoy life 🙂
=> Understanding is ego, what is needed is Self-realization. Enjoy resting in the Self which is Bliss.
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On 4/9/2024 at 10:13 AM, Mandy said:
If a relationship, job, living situation or place, etc doesn't feel aligned, alignment must be found first before changing the situation.
Got it, so feeling aligned is the litmus test for whether something is good or not. -
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I have to admit I’m not grokking why discord is a problem. A lot of great things come from conflict, a lot of growth. And I don’t see why the opposite of discord is not concord. It seems kinda Stage Green to have this utopian idea that everyone needs to be pleasant and positive all the time. If you attach to that, that causes suffering because you’re trying to control everything to get a result. You’re like forcing things to your liking. That’s gonna have an obvious backlash to it. It seems to me that it would lead to a lot of suffering — like why can’t everyone feel their emotions the way I idealize they should be felt, which I don’t even feel or embody myself. It seems like a human idealism at the Stage Green stage on the spiral.
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24 minutes ago, Phil said:
Enlightenment illness.
Spiritual enlightenment disease is the only good disease. -
I see spirituality as the inverse of addiction. I know what people are saying when they say this though, and I think it has merit when we look at the ego's attachment to spirituality without Transcendence.
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34 minutes ago, Phil said:
How so?
I'm somewhat suspect of emotions just as I am of thoughts. If I were restricting myself to the human, I would say of course any sane person would prefer to have constructive thoughts and harmonious and positive emotions. But I also see too, alternatively, that attachment to anything positive can lead to suffering because things aren't always going to go that way, and it's not clear how much control we have over basically being happy all the time. There's gotta be a way to be Happy that goes beyond happiness. This means no matter what the thoughts and emotions are doing, or what the body is doing, what the mind is doing, what the ego is doing -- I'm Happy regardless. My Happiness goes beyond happiness in other words. You can pull the I-thought out of emotions as you can thoughts. This is a complex issue, I'm not trying to overly challenge your view. I agree with it. I'm huge on emotions for guidance as I've said on here. But I also realize too the trap of attaching to positive and harmonious emotions. It can lead to unnecessary suffering because emotions are a mixed-bag and not always the singular or best thing to be focused on because often they're passions that come from ego. Of course ego wants to be happy, young, beautiful, strong, rich, pain free, etc. But that is a thought and an attachment.
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12 hours ago, Phil said:
Because emotions aren’t seen, level is a thought, there is no ego there is attachment to, emotions aren’t things which thoughts could be pulled out of, nor are emotions someone’s or not someone’s.
Given what you said here, I'm confused about the focus on emotions as some kind of guidance mechanism. -
It's hard to give one reason why breakups hurt so bad. The pain is obvious and terrible and can be duly noted -- there's nothing like it. I think some of it is loss of probably your best friendship. The fact of the loss of the closeness because it was so close. The loss of the dream you had of the future. The loss of somebody to love. The loss of the receipt of love. The fact that you still care deeply about that person. The fact that nothing came out of something you had such almost certain hope for at some point. The loneliness that comes from it. It's one thing to lose a relationship -- it's another thing to lose the love of your life. It depends on how long you were together, but the longer you are it can be hard because your lives are kind of merged together. You grew together and then that was slowly probably ripped apart, often for reasons that aren't even fully understandable. The relationship died. It's like relationships have a life of their own. Even if both people want it to work, sometimes it just doesn't. You were each other's support system at a very deep level. And the amazing highs at the beginning are almost replaced by equivalent lows at the end -- kind of like a zero sum game. For everything you received, you pay it all back.
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I think "well being" is correlated with spiritual attainment. Well being has to be independent of human circumstance on some level.
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This doesn't embed but it's excellent! Nice and loud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDBkT0x5Gxs -
"Golden Words of Wisdom: Selections from Sri Ramana Maharshi" edited by J. Sithamparanathan. This is an audiobook version. Great resource for learning Advaita Vedanta especially if you have an allergy to reading. I highly recommend this!
https://www.audible.com/pd/Golden-words-of-wisdom-Audiobook/B0C3B4PZ11 -
The detail in this is amazing when you zoom in.
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Truth knows the mind and experience are false/unreal. There is subtle experience which is inner and includes the mind and gross experience which is everything outer. The Self is not inner or outer because it’s qualityless or nondual. You can also say it’s not real or unreal either. I’ve seen Shankara say this. So even when we say the Self is real that’s still putting it into a subject-object duality with the mind. The mind puts things into subject-object relations which brings about duality.
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On 7/25/2023 at 5:54 AM, Phil said:
The instant the separate self of thought, all knowing & understanding are recognized as thoughts… beliefs… liberation is recognized to already be the case. The recognition is always available and is not attained, obtained nor is there anyone which becomes any thing. The seeking ends when the seeking for knowing & understanding ends. There’s no difference. This is ‘where’ actually feeling (Feeling) is, ‘where’ the game / charade / facade ends. Here, now, already. Seeking is knowing & understanding / which is avoidance of that all is (so to speak) being does for you. The Present. 🤍
Wiggle the fingers and notice how ridiculous it is to claim there is another, a second self, the doer, which is doing this. It’s the same for every single arising thought / narrative of what the doer, knower, understander is or isn’t doing, does or doesn’t know, or does or doesn’t understand.
The only exception is the ego, the separate self, the one which knows & understands. “Yeah but for me”.
As if somehow, in some way, knowing & understanding are going to result in feeling. That is what suffering is. Innocence appears as arrogance. It’s all avoidance of feeling, of love. You’re infinite and you don’t know a God damn single finite thing thing because you’re infinite & unconditional and all these things & conditions like knowing & understanding are beliefs ‘of’ the ‘separate self’ / the activity of thought. When one goes so does the other because there is already not two and it’s just thoughts.
In short, it’s all to avoid feeling emotions / feeling, because when so to speak you do - none of the believed interpretations, which all involve “you” - hold any water. Thus enlightenment is simply, ordinary and already the actuality.
But you know & understand so much and therein must defend your self.
Otherwise you’d be happiness which being infinite of course doesn’t know or understand anything as ‘it’ has no thing to claim and is already the case.
Happened to me… happened… isn’t happening… nothing’s happening.
Amazing as the message is, this forum can be used to ramble on for decades without ever actually stoping to question if a thought is true.
@Phil My question is why aren’t emotions seen as being on the same level as thoughts when it comes to attaching to ego? I can pull the I-thought out of emotions and even say “these emotions are not mine”. Good or bad, concordant or discordant, the emotions are not mine. -
@Reena @Phil Let me attempt to clarify. You can realize your ego is not Yours and that You doesn't control you. I know this sounds a bit cray cray at first. You have be open to the idea that the ego is not connected to the Self and actually doesn't even exist. This is not about shaming the ego, it's much deeper than that. Anyway, this is hard to communicate. Think of the Self as a handheld mirror and the ego as what's being displayed in the mirror. The mirror when it has awoken to its true nature doesn't even care what is being displayed in its lens so to speak. It knows it's the mirror and regardless of what is being displayed in its lens, it is not existentially affected by any of that as the mirror. What is displayed in the mirror's lens is the illusion of reality. The Truth of Reality is the existence of the Mirror or the Self. That's a good pointer as to the relation between the ego and the Self that I got from Adi Shankara. You can see how the ego is an illusion of the Self but not the Self and why the Self is not concerned with ego. The Self is not threatened at all by ego. But imagine the mirror thought it was what was being displayed in its lens! That would be mistaking the ego to be the Self. The Mirror is the Witness to what's being displayed in its lens. Notice how the Mirror is unchanging too and outside of the change going on in what it's Witnessing. It's outside of space and time and also Omniscient and Omnipresent because it knows the Truth of what is being displayed (but not Real) and what it is as the Self. It's Self-realized as the Mirror. The power of the Advaita Vedanta pointer. I'm kind of in love with this right now to be honest. But you gotta let it work on you, it's not just theory. It has to get under your skin and for me it kinda has. I'm re-integrating it because I've studied this stuff for years. I have more clarity now as to the Self vs. the not-Self distinction. Other people are in the lens too. The only thing that exists is the one Mirror itself.
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5 hours ago, Orb said:
"The Self" is such a genius pointer to be honest, I can't even spoil the joke because it's that good.
I agree. The Self is one of the best pointers for the Divine Masculine I’ve come across. Transcendence in how I interpret Zen is another great one — where even the Self can be seen to be nonsense. But that’s a different pointer for a different phase of the path. One does not need to destroy the beautiful flowers to know they don’t exist. Same with the pointers. Each pointer is like a beautiful flower when it’s the one in your vase on your spiritual altar. Without pointers all we would have is silence. I think it’s important to realize how deep pointers go, and that if we want to get down to it all of it is pointers, even what we think is truth or Truth. Even what I’m saying here is a pointer. Anything said is basically a pointer — but even this statement is a pointer too lol. I could say deep but that would be a pointer too. Try doing without pointers and see how long that goes. Here’s another good example the pointer of traps existing. Well you know someone like clockwork is going to say the trap of thinking there are traps! Anything said can be turned around with some degree of validity in another thing said, even if we have to stretch to create one. We can laugh at each other’s pointers basically, that kind of scoffing itself is a kind of non-conceptual pointer. I kind of laugh at the Love pointer to be honest, inside I do. I just find it funny for some reason. -
This is a powerful image in the sense of being a deep image as well. Especially if you interpret the animal as an alligator or crocodile. I like how you can't really tell whether the animal is nice or mean in this image. It's ambiguous.
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Ironically, the best person one could keep a safe distance from is their own self.
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Instrumental only version of Van Halen II. Eddie's guitar playing on this album is so good: brilliant and emotional, a nice balance there. He has a different rhythm guitar style on this album with more chug chug heavy metal style riffing. He plays a little differently on each album trying out new things (at least on the albums I like which are every thing up to "1984" minus the album "Diver Down"). This was released in 1979.
EVH - guitar
Michael Anthony - bass
Al Van Halen - drums
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11 hours ago, Orb said:
Remove anything from your mind Involving any self or any self perceiving anything.
You can also remove the mind from the Self. I can tell you're having lots of realizations right now. You can remove the self (ego) from the Self too. It's not really a removing, it's a knowing what is Real and what is a unreal. There's no need to reject the false, it just kinda falls away once Truth is realized. I've been going through this myself lately so that's why I'm sharing it here.
It's the duality or link between the Self and the not-Self that is illusory/false/unreal -- this is a deep pointer. The problem is it's deeper than anyone would want to go, naturally, because it involves the death/dissolving of that connection (link) between the Self and the ego. How this ever happens at all is really a kind of miracle. That link is a thought, the "I thought". You bring the "I thought back" into the Self where it dissolves (Maharshi teaches this). -
The ego generates discord but the Self doesn't care. Discord is fine but intimately insignificant as is "concord" (the opposite of discord). The Self doesn't care about concord either. That's all ego which is unreal. I'm trying to give you a pointer as to how much deeper this goes than most people realize if they're seriously interested in spiritual enlightenment work. You can half-ass it all you want. But that only goes so far (no pun intended lol).
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Music
in Celebrating & Sharing
Posted · Edited by Joseph Maynor
Nice remaster! I've always loved this album. It's interesting how all their albums sound different. I can hear things in this remaster that I couldn't hear before.
Robert Plant – vocals
Jimmy Page – guitars
John Paul Jones – bass, piano, Mellotron, organ, synthesizer
John Bonham – drums