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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: cez]
    #20322062 - 07/24/14 04:08 PM (9 years, 6 months ago)

Yeah, that is pretty much it OP. The Philokalia states we must give up ALL hope in things visible. Contemplate that for a little while.


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: Icelander]
    #20325013 - 07/25/14 02:25 AM (9 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

Icelander said:
Quote:

circastes said:
Is this the essence of spirituality? The bliss of godliness, your own Self revealed, never lost never forgotten only journeying within itself with the use of the illusion of mind - some power it has to play with itself... finally, one day, rediscovers itself, usually in the later twilight years of life but in the true religious seeker comes early, these eager and thirsty souls, these sons of God... maybe in their twenties or thirties, they find out that...

...it is but your own nature that you have sought long after, your own essence... the eternal untainted happiness of nothing but what you essentially are.

Is that the essence of spirituality, is it the ultimate spiritual prize? Yourself, eternal and free, surely playing some trick on yourself... finally comes home and that's that.

Is there anything more spiritual?




IMO it's the center of self centered indulgence.  But you enjoy it until you have to leave home and get a job and experience the joys of nature (survival of the fittest)

I really don't understand what passes for "spirituality" around here.  I recently was in discussion with another poster here who responded when I pointed out all the evil and suffering his favored religion was causing in the world replied matter of factly that he was in no way concerned with that as long as the religion fulfilled his personal spiritual needs.  And there you have it folks.




If you are referring to me, then no, I never said that. I actually said I was deeply saddened by any suffering caused by the church.

But how can a religion "cause" suffering? It's people who cause suffering. A religion is just a set of beliefs and practices. It has no power to do anything except the power which you yourself give to it. You say religion causes suffering, how do you know that perhaps what if suffering is causing religion? Did you ever think of that one. If you only look at things from one angle, all you'll see is that angle, which appears to evidently be the case with you here. But what if causality is a little more complex than that, and things are all linked in a complex network of relationships which humans then label "causes" and "effects"


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: easyskunkin]
    #20335908 - 07/27/14 02:51 AM (9 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

easyskunkin said:
Quote:

Deviate said:

But how can a religion "cause" suffering? It's people who cause suffering. A religion is just a set of beliefs and practices. It has no power to do anything except the power which you yourself give to it.




Wrong. Beliefs directly influence the way people act. For example, the ridiculous belief Germans are a superior race of promethean heroes and Jews an inferior race of parasites directly caused the holocaust. Superstitions about sorcery carried by the Catholic church led to the extermination of hundred of thousands, if not millions of individuals during the dark ages, etc...




Whoa whoa whoa, hold up. I did not say that beliefs didn't unfluence the way we act, I said that religion is just a set fo belief and practices. Now we all know that the Holy Bible says that we should not kill, that we should love our neighbor as ourself and that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. If everyone adhered to those three simple things, the world would be a completely different place. So you see, religion, like everything else, is neutral. Its like a hammer. You can use it to build a house for you and your wife and child or you can use it to bash in the head of your neighbor's child, thus murdering him. But the hammer itself isn't to blame. We don't put hammers on trial, we put the people who used them on trial.


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher] * 1
    #20335947 - 07/27/14 03:10 AM (9 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

deCypher said:
Well, their mental state is certainly different from humans... they lack our specific level of self-awareness.  Consequently they cannot ruminate on their inevitable mortality, they cannot suffer from death anxiety, they cannot be tortured by guilt for past actions or by worry for future ones, and they are not bothered by any questions of right or wrong.

That is certainly a more peaceful mind-state than ours, I'll grant you, but in day-to-day life they are constantly occupied with the bare needs of survival: finding food, protecting their own, finding a mate, and making sure they live another a day.  That, to me, is not peace, even if they lack the capacity to deem it so.




To you, but we are not talking about you. We are talking about animals. One thing you might not be taking into account is that finding food, finding a mate, mating, raising offspring , etc can be FUN. How do you know that animals aren't having fun when they do those things?

Also I would like to ask what is peace to you? If attending to survival needs and peace cannot co-exist for you, then what kind of peace do you experience? A peace which ends the moment you must find food or find a mate, is not a very good peace imo.  It seems almost as if from your point of view, one cannot simultaneously be peaceful and yet also engaged in life. Why do you feel this way? It is my experience that the more mental peace I have, the more I am able to engage in life and without the peace being disturbed because one starts to notice that life itself is valuable.


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher]
    #20336007 - 07/27/14 03:37 AM (9 years, 6 months ago)

Quote:

deCypher said:
Nope, disagree entirely.

Our true "nature" isn't any kind of emotion.  Happiness is an emotion, bliss is an emotion, so is pain and so is suffering.

We are human beings and we experience these emotions when we are feeling good, or when we are feeling bad.  There is no intrinsic emotion to be felt without any initial prompting sensation.




So what is there, then? I say, consider your sleep. When in deep sleep you are not feeling emotions. And yet viritually everyone associates this state of deep sleep with peace. People say "I slept happily" not "I slept neutrally" and people covet sleep, rather than treat it as something neutral.

Now I am going to remind you that this the spirituality and mycisticm forum. If you are postin' here you should be at least a little familiar with what spiritual people and mystics say. What do they say? Well, they pretty muych all say that the natural state, is peace or unconditional love, not neutrality. I should add that this is consistent with my experience. Emotions come and go but existence itself does not come and go, it remain always existing. If we isolate this sense of "I am" and allow it to be by itself, not hooked onto to circumstances constantly, what do we find? I find that it seems naturally peaceful and then it is when I become involved in identifications, that is when the peace becomes disturbed. Now, you may have a different experience. It may be that when you remain with the sense of amness, you experience blankness or ntruality. This is perfectly normal in fact, and this is also my own experience. But what I learned from my spiritual teachers was that this happens when one is a beginner and if you can make it through this stage, then what happens next is very beautiful. You see, as one inquires into hi or her true nature, the mind throws everything it can at you in order to make you stop, give up or deciee it ain't worth it. hence, the mind will attempt to convince you the natural state is just a neutrial boring state so that you dont go for it no more.


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher]
    #20345756 - 07/29/14 07:20 AM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

deCypher said:
Quote:

Deviate said:
To you, but we are not talking about you. We are talking about animals. One thing you might not be taking into account is that finding food, finding a mate, mating, raising offspring , etc can be FUN. How do you know that animals aren't having fun when they do those things?

Also I would like to ask what is peace to you? If attending to survival needs and peace cannot co-exist for you, then what kind of peace do you experience? A peace which ends the moment you must find food or find a mate, is not a very good peace imo.  It seems almost as if from your point of view, one cannot simultaneously be peaceful and yet also engaged in life. Why do you feel this way? It is my experience that the more mental peace I have, the more I am able to engage in life and without the peace being disturbed because one starts to notice that life itself is valuable.




My household pets (two cats) are far more peaceful than the wild, stray, mangy cats I observe outdoors.  My cats don't have to worry about finding food.  They don't have to worry about encroaching on another stray cat's territory.  They don't have to worry about being raped by some stray tomcat just because he liked the scent of their pheromones.

Quote:


My household pets experience far more peace than any wild animal does.  Also, look up Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  Mere survival is on the bottom of the list.




Thats nice for your pets but not all animals are happy in captivity. Many animals prefer to live in the wild, even if it is more dangerous.

Quote:


No one is capable of being peaceful while constantly having to worry about finding food and shelter.  It is only after satisfying the most basic needs that one is able to even think about peace, let alone be peaceful.




Well I am just going to quote the article you posted because as far as i could tell, it supports my position.

"Who you really are is already perfect and at ease with all that is in existence."

"you are at ease in the eternal self, which never dies and can never be harmed by any experience, not even the ones the personality is having on earth. You can live as this eternal self because you are not the personality. You can live knowing the secret of life on earth: that it is all just a thought in the mind of God. You are privy to the knowledge that even the unpleasant experiences in life cannot harm you, that you long outlive your personality with all its motives, drives, accomplishments and strategies."

Again, if peace can only be had when all our basic needs are satisfied then that is not a very good peace because it could all go wrong at any moment. There was a time in my life when I had a decent job, made lots of money, had all my basic survival needs more than satified and yet was anything but peaceful. More recently, I have fallen on difficult times. Many days I have struggled to find enough food to eat and yet, although i still struggle and suffer sometimes, I am MUCH more peaceful than I was back when I had all my needs met but was in a bad place psychologically and spiritually. Having to struggle to find food is (in my experience) not the terrible peace destroying monster you make it out to be. That is part of the game of life. Having to go hungry sometimes is not any different from having to deal with any other physical health problem. Lack of food is simply one of thousands of things that can kill or harm the body or cause pain/weakness. In fact, the Bible says that the poor are blessed and that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

Furthermore, Jesus Christ said "worry not for the morrow, saying what shall we eat, what shall we wear, for your heavenly Father knows you need those things... Is life not more than food and the body more than clothing?"

You see, just because you might not know where your next meal is coming from, that doesn't mean you have to let it upset you and make you unhappy. It is possible to live in the kind of faith where you learn to trust that things will be ok, even if they are painful or difficult at times. In my own experience, the more I learn to trust life and my Heavenly Father, the better I am able to deal with hardship without falling into despair and despondency.

Quote:



Seems like you are falling into the "bliss trap".  Read further into Eastern/Buddhist studies of meditation and they will all tell you that feeling sensations of bliss is a natural step on the way to enlightenment.  However, to proceed further one must not give into these feelings and become entrapped by them, because true enlightenment is not an emotion--it simply is.  To get sucked into these feelings of euphoria and "true happiness" is to miss the point, because beyond a certain level of spiritual awakening, none of that really matters.  Everything just simply... is.




I did not say enlightenment was an emotion, I said that it wasn't neutrality. I never said that enlightenment was just feeling an emotion of bliss 24/7 or that one reaches it by chasing pleasurable feelings. I would agree that one could say that it simply is, because words cannot capture it. However, many teachers have been quite clear that is not some spaced out, detached neutral state. For instance, Buddha said that Nirvana was the highest happiness. Jesus spoke of a "kindgom of heaven", Hindus call it Sat-Chit-Ananda which means existence-consciousness-bliss, Tony Parsons says that liberation is unconditional love, the Bible says that God is love, Steve Norquist said the Bliss of enligtenment was a million times beyond the bliss of IV heroin  and Jan Esmann says that Self-Realization is Love-Bliss and Ramana Maharshi described it as "undescribible bliss".

Here, check out Jan's website: http://lovebliss.eu/index.html. Are you saying all these guys are wrong and you know better? And why did you post an article that supports what I and all the guys I listed are saying then?

Quote:


Just to address this, people generally tend to covet [deep] sleep because the lack of experience contained therein is preferable to the negativity they are exposed to throughout their day-to-day existence, not because the lack of experience was a positively felt emotion (since it, by definition, isn't felt at all).




Why are you so hung up on emotions? I SAID that in deep sleep there is a lack of emotion. Here is where we seem to disagree. You seem to think that without emotion, there can be no enjoyment, everything is neutral or something like that. I am saying that no, the absolute (into which one is absorbed albeit unconsciously, when in deep sleep and consciously in enlightenment) is itself, self-existent enjoyment. This is what your article seems to imply and this is what pretty much every teacher I know of says, for instance to quote Ramana Maharshi "The Eternal being is only happiness". This eternal being is coming even before such things as the brain and nervous system, so (and Tony Parsons affirms this) enjoyment is not even dependent on the existence of a brain and nervous system, which obviously are needed for feelings human emotions. Or as the Bible puts it, "God's love endures forever". God's love is not some petty human emotion dependent on the brain and nervous system, it is eternal. To quote the Bible again "The Lord is an eternal rock". It doesn't come and go like human emotions, which are relative. I can see then the temptation to assume it is neutral, but I think that neutrality is in fact just another human feeling/emotion. Life itself is may be neutral in the sense that it has no specific goal or intention for existing, but it is ecstatically alive and loving and blissful and free, not neutral. How is this the case? its the ultimate mystery.. The ultimate mystery for me at least, how is God no thing (for God is not a thing, but spirit or living nothingness) and yet at the same time he is very happy?


Edited by Deviate (07/29/14 07:27 AM)


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher]
    #20353226 - 07/30/14 09:39 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:


If you don't understand how a fat, happy indoor cat who never has to worry about being fed, finding water, attacked by other animals, or being hit by a car isn't generally more peaceful than a stray cat struggling to survive in the city, I don't know what to tell ya dude.  Of course certain animals will be happier if they have a larger territory to roam, but that in turn provides risks like predators, lack of food source, etcetera etc.




I am not denying this, but I think it is important to understand that liberation/enlightenment is beyond circumstances. It is freedom from circumstances, but not necessarily detachment from them. A jnani may struggle to find food, they may even appear dismayed about their lack of food, but they are not experiencing the situation the same as an ego identified individual. They know that no matter what happens, even if they starve to death, things will be ok and not just that they will be ok, but that they already are ok right now.

Quote:


I don't mean to say it is necessarily impossible to feel peaceful when your basic survival needs aren't being met; my point is that it's much harder to do so.  Again, look up Maslow's theory of needs and the concept of self-actualization:




Harder for whom? That is the question I feel is it not being addressed. I certainly agree that for the average person, finding food is very important to their level of peace and obviously lack of food is going to destroy their peace and well being and could also slow down their spiritual growth even. However, for a liberated person, the amount of food they have has nothing to do with their liberation. It doesn't mean they won't try to find food if they need it or that they cannot feel feelings like hunger, but they perceive all this differently. They have a freedom from circumstances and this freedom doesn't change if they have to skip a meal or if their life situation becomes more challenging.


Quote:


OK, great.  Why do you then promptly go ahead to contradict yourself in the very same paragraph?  :confused:





I don't contradict myself. I say that because enlightenment often gets talked about in terms of love, bliss, happiness, etc, many people imagine that it involves attaining some state in which you feel bliss all the time but thats not what it is at all. Instead it is actually even better than that, it is freedom from all experiences, be they blissful or unhappy. This freedom is not describable but it is not a detached neutral state, it is itself blissful and loving. But these are not emotions. To put it simply, everything is energy and energy in its unmanifest form is love-bliss.

Quote:


If you read Buddhist meditational texts (which I generally trust on the matter because they've been doing it for thousands of years),




As opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition which just started yesterday? Not that Buddhism isn't trustworthy, but there are many ways to speak about enlightenment and how things are from the Buddhist perspective isn't necessarily the only way to look at them.

Quote:


you will learn that yes, you will experience ecstatic states of supreme bliss during your meditation.  However, the point is not to focus on them.  Enlightenment is NOT one and the same with this state.  To move on to true Nirvana one must dispassionately regard the feeling of bliss, and just observe.  Do not cling to it, do not dwell it, do not confuse it for the eventual goal.




Ok you already said this and I already responded and told you that yes I am familiar with this teaching. Simply repeating it over again isn't enough to change my mind. This may be the Buddhist way but this is not the only way to enlightenment. That is why I suggested you read Jan Essman. He says that there are two forms of Self-realization, one with love-bliss and one without. According to jan, Self-realization without love-bliss will always eventually turn into Self-Realization with love-bliss, so either form will do. However, Yan also says that because Self-realization with love-bliss is the eventual goal, there is no harm in developing love-bliss now, even before basic self-realization. The Buddhists say that bliss is a distraction, they advocate looking for the truth from a purely neutral, observational standpoint. Yan says that this method can lead to what he calls "the Zen trap". In the Zen trap, one with becomes identified as no-mind, with void or pure nothingness being. This is not Self-Realization though, Self-Realization is complete freedom from identification with mind. Basic Self-Realization, without love-bliss is what most Buddhist meditation techniques are aimed that. This is fine, but it does not mean that other types of techniques are invalid. In fact, Yan disagrees that bliss is a distraction and instead he advocates merging in love-bliss if possible, or at least, developing love-bliss even prioor to enlightenment. You can read about his meditation techniques on his website and I encourage you to do so, for they are extremely powerful. Now I am a Christian, so I am not so into Eastern Meditation but in my tradition, we also focus on developing love-bliss before enlightenment. We go through a process where something we call the "Holy Spirit" comes and gradually warms our hearts and gives us the opportunity to choose to love God and not sin.

Quote:


This is what I mean by saying our true Buddha nature is not an emotion.  It is not bliss, it is not happiness, it isn't anything at all.  :lol:  It just is (in other words, neutrality), and assigning value-laden labels like Bliss or Happiness to it means you have dragged your pure No-Mind down into the intellectual mire of conceptualization.




I agree that it just is but I disagree with neutrality, to me that is just another label. Neutral as opposed to what? You see, neutrality is relative. ALl the values in Samsara are relative and have opposites. Neutrality is what we measure degrees of importance relative too. The non dual Self is beyond all this labeling.

Secondly, there are a couple of disctinctions here which I think are important to make. First of all, there is an impersonal and a personal aspect to reality. Buddhists tend to focus on the impersonal, whereas Christians tend to focus on the personal God aspect. The whole encompasses both of these entirely.

This is why I must disagree with your notion that Buddha nature is nothingness, neutrality. Yes, it IS that but that represents an imcomplete picture of it, because it is also Love-Bliss. Think about Jesus Christ. Think about his great love for mankind. Think about how he gave his life for us, while we were still sinners. Now tell me, why would a neutral nothingness come into the world and preach about some spiritual Kingdom, heal people, open the eyes of the blind and then give his life? You see, you cannot ignore God's love. Love did that. ANd that is why as Yan explains, when one reaches full enlightenment, and sees oneself in everything, the result is Love-Bliss. Unmanifest love-bliss. And this is NOT an emotion, this is what is. Love-Bliss is what exists.

Again, why would Buddha say that Nirvana is the highest happiness? How do you answer that? How do respond to teachers like TOny Parsons who say that he falls in love with bus stops, trees, etc, who says that liberation is finding the perfect lover? How does neutrality in any way resemble finding the perfect lover?

Do you see now how there is something missing from your notion of enlightenment?


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: Deviate]
    #20353313 - 07/30/14 09:58 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:



Absolutely.  Enjoyment is by definition an emotion.  Buddha-nature is beyond happiness and fear.  Buddha-nature just is, without any human qualifiers like you're trying to ascribe to it.  At least according to what I've gleaned from my readings on the subject and from personal experience.  :shrug:




No, this is simply not correct you are misunderstanding. Enlightenment, is freedom from identification with mind. In that sense, it just is. It is not happiness, or bliss or enjoyment, it is simply correctly seeing what you are. So what you say is correct, speaking relative to the ignorant Self, about what we mean by "Realization".

But after you see what you really are, then comes the question what are you? What do you see that you are? You can't just say "nothing" because what sees that it is nothing and what about the world, emotions, feelings, thoughts, dream evenetc? Are you saying they don't exist? If they do exist, then do they exist apart from you? Even if they appear in void and ultimately have void as their substratem, they themselves are not void because they posses qualities. What gives rise to qualities, if nothing exists? Well, either they exist apart from you, in which case you cant be nothing or youd have no ability to see them, or they exist within you, as your own being manifest. So your experience, is the manifest expression of your own being. An elightened person recognizes the unmanifest reality which gives rise to it, the whole which contains the potential for anything. This is ultimately undescribible and I am afraid "neutrality" is a pitifully inadequate description. However, I will say that the sages claim that there is enjoyment taking place. Also, why would you want to give up everything, spend endless hours in meditation, etc, all in order to get a place where there was no enjoyment?

So if enlightenment is recognizing what you are, being enlightened is love-bliss.


Edited by Deviate (07/30/14 10:17 PM)


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OfflineDeviate
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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: Chronic7]
    #20362132 - 08/01/14 08:44 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

The Chronic said:
The way i see it is that your identity dissolves/merges into Ananda to the point that you are that, til there's no differentiation anymore, no more ups & downs, so total peace, you go through all the blissfull experiences to keep you on the right track or even sometimes throw you off it but when you've arrived you're no longer chasing blissfull experiences, you've become an emobodyment/beacon of bliss, there's no differentiation between bliss & yourself, experience & experiencer

That being said it can be good to aim for equanimity, neutrality etc when seeking truth, so as to really go all the way beyond conviction, it can be good to reject blissfull experiences in favor of stable truth, but most people would be kidding themselves saying they don't chase after bliss




Do you think it would be correct to say that relative to the physical world or the worlds of form, in which there appears to be a duality between those worlds and the one who perceives them, the perceiver is in fact nothing and neutral but further examination reveals that the seer and seen are actually not separate but together form one thing and the nature of this thing is love and bliss?


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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher]
    #20366037 - 08/02/14 06:34 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

deCypher said:
Quote:

The Chronic said:
it can be good to reject blissfull experiences in favor of stable truth




This is what I strive for.

I have tried chasing bliss and it led me nowhere but downwards.  Ultimately I still believe the true nature of Reality is inapplicable for any of our human labels, including "love" and "bliss".  Neutrality is the best word I can think of to describe it, but of course even that is a human label in the end.

Ah, well, mysticism + language... what can you do?  Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.  :grin:





Of course it's beyond words, for words are themselves of it and within it. However, the reason it can be nice to have it described as love-bliss is because if we said it was hate-pain, then who would want to approach it? I think that fear, is what holds most people back from really opening themselves up to the Lord, or the infinite. They prefer to stay closed off and contracted because even though it hurts a lot, it is familiar and gives them a sense of control and security.


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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: cbub]
    #20375305 - 08/04/14 09:48 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Thank you for pointing that out. It reminds me of a discussion I was having with my sister a few weeks ago, she studies anthropology and as a result she thinks that just about everyone or every culture or humans in general are always being ethnocentric or anthropocentric. I was trying to explain to her, that we have no other way to be.


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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: deCypher]
    #20377655 - 08/05/14 10:37 AM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Perhaps we should leave it to those who are enlightened to define enlightenment to the masses.

To me, saying that negative feelings go away, well i don't see how that is any less false than saying it is love-bliss. Enlightenment doesn't mean the body becomes immune to pain or the mind loses the ability to experience sadness or negative emotion. THe way I understand it, is everything is seen from a different perspective. So while the average person might interpret pain in a very negative way, an enlightened person does not see pain as an obstacle. But the only way to truly understand it, is to be enlightened.

Another place where I think confusion may be arising is that you seem to only be describing the manifest side of enlightenment.

Quote:

Enlightenment involves dispassionately recognizing the constant flood of emotions, both positive and negative, that enter our mind-stream.  By recognizing them, not indulging in them, and letting them pass and go, one becomes free (or at least more free) from the chains of indulgence and restraining emotion.  :shrug:





This is all manifest phenomena. In fact to me this doesn't even sound like a description of enlightenment, it sounds like a description of dispassion, which one develops through spiritual practice. In enlightenment, one is beyond all this. The manifest remains but one becomes aware of the unmanifest, which is more real than the manifest. The unmanifest, is described as being pure, that is to say it is an undifferentiated whole. One part of the unmanifest isn't one way and another part another way, its all just the unmanifest. And it IS like this 24/7, it does not change, only the manifest changes. The unmanifest is before space, time, change etc. Words cannot really describe it, but one thing that all the sages seem to say is that it is very very very good. It is not a painful place to be.


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Re: Untainted happiness being our nature [Re: Icelander]
    #20384244 - 08/06/14 06:24 PM (9 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

Icelander said:
Perhaps we should leave it to those who are enlightened to define enlightenment to the masses.


and exactly how would the unenlightened know who those "enlightened" ones are?

I've seen enough around this place to know that they don't but think they do.  :satansmoking:





Did I say anything about knowing who the enlightened ones are? Basically waht I was saying was, as long as we feel confused and unenlightened, perhaps (and I just said perhaps, not definitely or anything) we should spend less time trying to explain and define something we really don't understand clearly yet.


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