u/No_Virus5100

So I've been in this community about a month.

Here are the points believers tend to differ on:

• Reincarnation: We were a soul that decided to come here / We were forced to come here / there was no "you" beforehand
• The goal of enlightenment is ego death vs. ego death isn't possible, even for the enlightened
• We have free will / we are all puppets of God/Brahman (Determinism)

Where do you stand on these topics?

If you feel strongly one way or another, is that due to what your faith tells you or your own personal enlightenment experience?

What other topics have I missed?

The only constant is change. Nothing lasts forever. This too shall pass. Change is inevitable.

Many are the platitudes about the changing world around us, and these phrases are all undeniably true. Yet they feel like a warning, a harbinger of an existential threat. Change is the wolf at our door.

When we are young, we see change as exciting, but as we age, we desire stability.  Knowing change is inevitable, we seek to be the agents of change so we can direct it, but much is outside of our control. Change, when it happens, often comes at an inopportune time; it upsets our routines, ruins our dreams, and alters our plans. It reminds us of how small we are.

We try to hold fast to the way things are before they become the way things were. It is a perpetual cycle of disappointment, or even disillusionment.

Yet the root of our problem is not change itself, but our reaction to it. It is we who become emotionally attached to a given state of the world, we who want things to never change. We are asking the world to be something it is not.

This desire for stability in an ever-changing world is something that we must free ourselves of if we want peace. Our attachment is the source of our pain.

Conquer yourself. Things will come: let them in. Things will go: let them leave. Until you can do both of these with ease, you will continue to chase after the mirage of stability.

- The Eternal Significance of the Present

📦

Imagine you’re sitting in an auditorium.

On the stage is a box. From your position, you can’t see its contents, and you never will from this angle.

A member of the audience is invited on stage to look into the box and report what they see.

They look in. They say it’s some kind of creature and have never seen anything like it. They describe it as best they can.

One by one other members of the audience are called up to do the same. But their descriptions of the creature are all slightly different.

What do you do?

Do you assume the box is empty? If so, are these people paid actors? Liars? Just crazy? How many people would have to come on stage before you accepted that there was *something* in the box, even if it was indescribable?

What would it take to change your mind? Would you have to see it for yourself?

If so… why not take the path yourself?

Good morning and happy Sunday, seeker.

Last night at around 1:30am ET, I woke up from a strange dream and was a little restless, so I did what most of us do these days: I checked my phone.

I read through a post titled “Is anyone truly happy?” The despair felt in the post and many of the comments moved me.

I had a sudden moment of clarity that one only finds while laying in the dark.

I wrote the following comment, which I felt was important enough to deserve its own post before it was lost to the algorithm.

I hope this helps someone.
________________________

The mind is like a dog, always trying to please us; it goes off into reality, scouring memory and predictions, to fetch evidence to support only our viewpoint.

The Buddha said “Life is Suffering,” so everywhere goes the mind, off to prove him right. It shows us only misery, so how does that make us feel?

What if the Buddha had said “Life is Good”? Or “Life is Beautiful”? “Life is Fulfillment”? Or “Life is Enough”? What would your mind show you then?

Yes, life is temporary. Everything is. Happiness is temporary. Pain is temporary. Suffering is temporary. This too, shall pass.

So what can we do?

Try to see the world like a child. The world is full of wonder. See it for what it is.

The world is fundamentally a place of peace. It is we, mankind, who defile it. We hurt each other, then focus on the pain we caused ourselves, and blame it all on the world itself.

If someone chopped food with a knife, is the knife good? If someone purposely cut themselves, is the knife evil?

Bad things do happen. It is not a perfect world. There exists disease, decay, and death. But the fact that there is a world to experience at all is amazing! If we are to suffer, let us do so while still finding amazement in the mystery.

How does a child see the world?

The child knows nothing. The child has no expectations of the world, so every day is an adventure. Every day is a surprise. Every day brings something to be marveled at.

As adults, we predict what tomorrow will bring, and are often disappointed when life doesn’t meet our expectations.

How ridiculous! The world is not here to make our every wish come true! That is work that we have to do!

See the world as it is: a miracle.

Empiricists seek to understand the world. It’s like attending a magic show and being blown away by the performance, only to have your smart-aleck friend theorize the whole ride home as to how the gimmicks were performed.

Yet knowing how the tricks actually work doesn’t make the engineering stagecraft any less brilliant, nor take away from the showmanship, nor does it mean the magic trick just occurred by accident or random chance.

The world is full of joy and wonder. The fact that life conforms to natural laws doesn’t make it any less amazing; it is just evidence as to the pragmatism, the practicality, and the consistency of God (or “the source”, if you prefer).

Send your mind off to find the beauty in the world.

Jennifer read all the books. She knows enlightenment requires sacrifice. She knows there are ten steps to get to the first of the twenty-five gates between her and enlightenment. She knows this process will take years, but she wants to be experience it, so she sets off on her journey.

Dan the LSD man feels enlightenment will come if he finds the right mix of drugs.

Debbie expects enlightenment will come if she just understands scripture well enough.

Bob expects there are no true obstacles between him and enlightenment. He does his inner work and expects nothing. In time, the gate is opened.

Be like Bob.

Paths are tools, but they are also obstacles. If you adopt a ladder of a thousand rungs, know you will then have to climb every rung.

Adopt a footstool instead.

Followers in this subreddit, what brings you here?

Are you a seeker of enlightenment?

Do you seek to guide others on their path?

Are you here to observe, mock, and troll?

Something else?

There are a lot of folks asking what enlightenment feels like.

I wrote the following notes after having a mystical experience, and subsequent mental breakdown, in 2021.

I have since written multiple philosophical books in an attempt to capture what I learned from this experience and share it with others. (Check my profile if you're curious,)

I hope this helps other seekers.

>I felt connected to something greater than myself. And while the feeling of being connected was new, I felt that the connection itself was always there. It was more like I was noticing it for the first time. Like the connection had been subconscious before, and it was now in my consciousness. Or almost like a detail that’s so ubiquitous it was like background noise and you never noticed it before.

>While I was experiencing the connection, I described it to others as seeing the world through the eyes of god. This was the only way I could describe it at the time, and my attempt to describe it to people who believe in a deity.

>It was a shock to me, most of all, who had been such a raving atheist and skeptic, to feel connected to some higher mind. But calling it God doesn’t seem accurate in the sense that I didn’t feel like it was something to fear. Nor did I feel it "thought" in the human sense of the word.

>It radiated light, warmth, love, acceptance, forgiveness, confidence. While connected to it, I felt the interconnectedness of all things; the cause and effect that is constantly unfolding around us—what the Buddhists call Karma and what the Christians call God’s Plan. I could sense these connections as clearly as I can see or hear. Everything was unfolding exactly how it should and everything was alright. I was in awe of the present.

>I felt connected to my fellow man on a deeper level. I told my family that I bet I could become friends with anyone. I beamed confidence and I felt like I could cut through anyone’s defense mechanisms and talk to them at their deepest level. And I deeply desired that connection. I wanted to give others this experience, or at least help them in some way.

>My own defense mechanisms were gone. I was so true in my being, so powerful in my persona, that I didn’t need them anymore. My psyche was invincible—no one could hurt me.

>My depression, ever present on some level, was gone. I felt a childlike joy for the first time in years.

>The connection was also a spiritual Internet of sorts. Being connected to this higher mind (for the lack of a better name) gave me direct access to deep, fundamental knowledge. I felt like I could ask anything and it would give me the answer, wholly, truly. These questions and answers were not codified in words; they were mere impressions. I received answers almost before I could even ask the question.

>I felt connected to my father and his father, both long deceased. I felt their love and warmth and personalities and knowledge as well. And they also communed with me in the same way—not through words but through the same direct, compressed thought. I described it as communicating through emotion at the time, but raw thought might be better. Words were not used, but the information was conveyed regardless.

>I learned some things while connected to the higher mind. And I felt compelled to write.  

>To describe the higher mind—diety, god, whatever—will be difficult. It was golden and white, like a star, but more like a galaxy in its “shape”. But it’s difficult to say it had form or shape because it is not of this plane. There are multiple dimensions to existence and we are only consciously aware of five of these—length, width, depth, time, and mind. Just as time is a dimension both inside and throughout the physical, and though we are aware of time but cannot touch it, the higher planes are woven through the lower and can indirectly impact them. The godmind sits in a dimension above our own. It is ever present and available to all things. I say it is in another dimension, but because, by existing in that dimension it is ever present, it so fills up that dimension that there is no space for anything else. You might as well say that the godhead and the dimension it resides in are one.

>Our individual minds exist in another dimension. Unlike the godhead we each take up a small space in this dimension just like we take up small space in the physical. Our minds are spherical like little bubbles floating in a vast darkness, all alone. Our only way to connect to each other, it appears to us, is through the physical world, and we desire most of all is not to be left alone in the darkness.

>Our souls—so ephemeral, so easy to deny—are on yet a higher plane. Soul is like raw life. The mind does the thinking, but it is the soul that experiences both the reality and the thought. It is who the mind is taking to. We are all part of the godhead and will return into it when we die. We originate from god, so to speak, and will return to it. It’s less an act of creation or birth or division or separation as it is a cycle of nature. Like the precipitation cycle. God is the ocean that we all come from and will eventually return to become a part of. In a way we are separated but this is only temporary, and perhaps even illusory, and we will all return back from whence we came. The Zen Buddhists use the metaphor of the dewdrop forming then flowing back into the sea. Did the dewdrop lose its nature?  There are some philosophies that state that we are all god, or that god is a part of us, or that our souls belong to god; they are all right and all wrong simultaneously. Things get lost in translation.

>I could see, from that vantage point, the moon that all the fingers of the different religions were trying to point to. I felt like I could understand how they were all correct, yet got lost; like taking metaphor too far. Or perhaps they didn’t have the words to describe their experience.

>Speaking of arrogance, in case someone else comes across these notes later, the one thing I positively want to stress is that I in no way feel like I am special or somehow deserving of the experience that I‘m describing. Nor do l think having had the experience am I somehow better than other people. Even while I was in that state of mind, I knew I was undeserving of the experience and even said to others that I didn’t deserve it. If anything, the experience was about how we are all connected and are all the same. Arrogance doesn’t fit into that experience at all. Patience, yes. Kindness, yes. Arrogance, never. 

>I didn’t sense that the god had a name. It certainly did not have a human styled sense of identity. There was no Jesus, no Buddha, nothing except …it. This massive well of souls, the uniform, universal consciousness. If it had a sense of identity it would be much more akin to the “I am what I am” that god said to Moses.  No name is required, for who else might be mistaken for it? There’s no need to differentiate between this universal consciousness and another. There’s no need for individual identity when there is no limit to your existence in breadth or time. It is all. It is everywhere. That is enough.

>So in many ways, the quest I set myself on in my twenties—the search for a universal truth—is now over. I tried many different faiths, and spent a very long time as an atheist, having given up on religions. Now, ironically, having had my personal religious awaking I’ve surrounded myself with those who do not believe in anything. I have a belief that is all my own, a personal religion that in a practical sense is still very similar to my atheism, but has more hope and ultimately faith in a better ending.