DisoRDeR said:

It was 1992. I was ten years old. I wasn't really into rock music yet, but my brother had started collecting CDs, and when our parents weren't home he'd blast grunge through the house. It was then that I first realized there was something in the way...

(someone had to do it)

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right on

Kurt said:

Ah indeed it was my childhood friend who heard from his elder sister, something called "unplugged".

More recently I also used to grow and smoke Salvia Divinorum, and I remember when I smoked I became aware of a feeling like there was this transmigration of people, that I was in a way being called to. It was not that I encountered these people, but just the feeling or impression or "the call" to crossing over or something that was "happening".

I thought of it later like a stream of ancestors going down to this river and getting in canoes, and going somewhere, and feeling pulled to come. Pulling is maybe more a salvia thing.

Probably everybody has experienced lucid states in dreams and with aid of psychedelics, as well as in different states of meditative absorption, right? When we describe relative experiences there seems to be different entry points. I think what the yoga sutras call Samprajnata Samadhi is probably to identify with a floating feeling that is very peaceful, and pretty rarified but definitely possible for mortal humans to experience. You have ordinary cognition, concentration and tendency of withdrawal of senses being actually described.

I'd venture that the specifically buddhist concept of a world of suffering and a destination of nirvana is generally less a phenomenal description. Far be it from me, but nirvana seems like a place you go and don't come back, which is not to imply anything either. It is word back. What I have read of Buddhist Sutras seems like edifying conversation that you can take with you, like a compass in difficult times. "The one that is wise knows that all that arises, is suffering". That is something I sometimes engage a conversation with, and it brings me around to a certain view of things, when things seem pretty bad. Well what then is bad?

There is just the word back, sometimes, and I think that is what buddhists get. I am not any expert, but I would say that practices of the indian subcontinent are all related. The Buddha's story was of how he was involved with the yogis, an aecetics, and so had a cultural impression of enlightenment, which was not stuck on words and doctrine but found in certain embodied practices, before he came to the bodhi tree. It seems in its response and comparably a dialectic/analytic tradition, to mostly refer to ethical practices. Middle way is broadness, maybe?

Just a thought, based on some experience. I think I am probably a " stream enterer" just sharing an experience. I guess that is what we are all doing. Will others share experience?

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DividedQuantum said:

All beings are in Nirvana all the time; it cannot be otherwise.  Every moment, each of which is right now, is spent in the state of Buddhahood; there is no nature which is not Buddha-nature.



'And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.'  Luke 17: 20-21

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