Enlightenment, Nonduality.

[Phil]

Just a topic starter…

Questions, comments, insights, all manors of sharing welcomed. 

[Joseph Maynor]

I think you become enlightened when you realize that awareness is not sense experience or the mind.  You realize the witness as a thing and as you (but not the egoic you).  The egoic you is seen in awareness.  It's this shift I think where someone becomes enlightened.  It's not that confusing actually.  What makes it confusing I think is people conflate spiritual enlightenment with ego development work without realizing these are kinda two separate things.  There's stuff after spiritual enlightenment, but I think that's where you become enlightened -- when you discover the witness as self and as not body and not mind.  Your sense of self changes from what it was before.  Before you thought awareness was mind.  Once you have that shift and it doesn't go away, you're enlightened.  Now there's more development work you can do from there, of course.  People even call this ego development work.  To be more nuanced, spiritual enlightenment is both different than and similar to "ego development work." There's a wobble in that duality. But in some sense, spiritual enlightenment is its own thing too.  And it can be talked about as its own thing independent from relation to the other (whatever that other may be).  

Nice to see one of your videos.  You sound like me where you seem (to me) to struggle to even put a narrative together sometimes because you're so wide in awareness.  I have to force myself sometimes to share the simple answer, but also qualify it as a pointer too.  That struggle to put a narrative together is a sign of high-consciousness, it's nothing to be ashamed of.  The more conscious you become the harder it is to put your narratives together to convey your experience to others.  People should notice this and see why this is happening.  It's because it's harder to create pointers to higher levels of development.  How do you show this, how do you tell this?  And you see all the traps too.  So you're leary about what you say too because you know that different pointers go with different perspectives and can be misinterpreted too.  But you don't want to be so caveat heavy that you're basically telling people to disregard what you're saying.  People expect a certain level of confidence in any narrative put forward as good from the person putting it forward.  

Edited December 28, 2023 by Joseph Maynor

[Jonas Long]

There's not really a duality of enlightened/unenlightened.  

[Phil]

10 hours ago, Joseph Maynor said:

I think you become enlightened when you realize that awareness is not sense experience or the mind.  You realize the witness as a thing and as you (but not the egoic you).  The egoic you is seen in awareness.  It's this shift I think where someone becomes enlightened.  It's not that confusing actually.  What makes it confusing I think is people conflate spiritual enlightenment with ego development work without realizing these are kinda two separate things.  There's stuff after spiritual enlightenment, but I think that's where you become enlightened -- when you discover the witness as self and as not body and not mind.  Your sense of self changes from what it was before.  Before you thought awareness was mind.  Once you have that shift and it doesn't go away, you're enlightened.  Now there's more development work you can do from there, of course.  People even call this ego development work.  To be more nuanced, spiritual enlightenment is both different than and similar to "ego development work." There's a wobble in that duality. But in some sense, spiritual enlightenment is its own thing too.  And it can be talked about as its own thing independent from relation to the other (whatever that other may be).  

Nice to see one of your videos.  You sound like me where you seem (to me) to struggle to even put a narrative together sometimes because you're so wide in awareness.  I have to force myself sometimes to share the simple answer, but also qualify it as a pointer too.  That struggle to put a narrative together is a sign of high-consciousness, it's nothing to be ashamed of.  The more conscious you become the harder it is to put your narratives together to convey your experience to others.  People should notice this and see why this is happening.  It's because it's harder to create pointers to higher levels of development.  How do you show this, how do you tell this?  And you see all the traps too.  So you're leary about what you say too because you know that different pointers go with different perspectives and can be misinterpreted too.  But you don't want to be so caveat heavy that you're basically telling people to disregard what you're saying.  People expect a certain level of confidence in any narrative put forward as good from the person putting it forward.  

Is time real?

[James123]

On 12/26/2023 at 7:46 PM, Phil said:

Just a topic starter…

Questions, comments, insights, all manors of sharing welcomed. 

My favorite answer is silence. 

[Joseph Maynor]