Teonanactl - Rapture

[The Rev]

I had an experience last night, after taking mushrooms, that is unlike anything I have ever known before. In fact, to say that it's something I've known suggests that, as an experience, it fit within the constraints of my mind. It didn't. It was something larger than my mind could grasp.

I left the familiar far behind. EVERYTHING ceased to be what it was. Emotions, thoughts, the ability to comprehend underwent constant re-definition - incomplete redefinition that my mind could not manage to get around. I felt like my mind, reality itself, were torn wide open, and that there was nothing there to anchor myself to.

I looked at all of my efforts to find "enlightenment", to see something bigger, and realized that I have been a fool, dancing at the edge of a precipice. Nothing could have prepared me for this. Samadhi, Satori, Enlightenment; these are ideas, manifestations of mind to describe something that is beyond mind. Mind is just a context, within infinity, attempting desperately to make it finite. What I experienced confronted me with the comic futility of that process.

It's going to take me awhile to sort this all out, and unfortunately, I can't even remember it as it was, because all I have is my mind to "make sense" of it. I was left with an idea, however, that I will share:

Reality is an idea, created by the mind, which is what the mind does. In fact, all we have are ideas, descriptions that contextualize experiences with respect to a structure of other ideas. That's all the mind is, just a structure of ideas. The thing is, there's nothing BUT ideas. And, even "Idea" is just an idea. Think about this, and you will come to realize that reality, as you know it, is nothing but a shadow cast by shadows cast by shadows, with no actual substantiation.

What is beyond this, what I saw last night, is no more than a beautiful, perfect, silence. It's the Emptiness they talk about in Buddhist thought. And it's nothing like I expected. Nothing like I thought.



The Rev

[Lloydy]

who else read that as tentacle rape and clicked it?

[geewhizitskatee]

I actually saw tabernacle rupture.

anyway, what you just described is beautiful. beyond words, and beyond comprehension by myself. I wish to someday be able to feel and touch and be what you are describing. I really wish you could say more so I could understand. But I realize that the only way to feel it is to experience it, and there are probably no more words for you to say.

words in themselves probably bring down the whole meaning, really.

I'm sorry I don't have more to add except I love you, and life, and this, and everything.

[BearsysRevenge]

I loved achieving that state of mind. Only felt that way once, but it was truly life changing.
And thank you for putting into words what I was never able to.

"We're only matter experiencing itself subjectively" - Bill Hicks

[The Rev]

I'm glad you understand what I mean, Bearsy. And I really need to check out this Bill Hicks fellow...



The Rev

[espiex]

Far out Rev, nicely said

It is disturbing in such a personal and fundamental way when your mind experiences complete unfamiliarity, but it can be so wonderful. You really notice how language doesn't even come close to conveying it, or memory to recording it.

[MelT]

I've experienced it too. Incredible and somehow familiar.
M

[Vertigo]

im one of the lucky few who has experienced this before too. all of us are in this thread and know exactly how the other one feels. i could picture it as the most empty, beutiful, black, infinate silence.

[JcP]

Rev, did you happen to figure out why we are stuck in this manifestation? Why we have a mind and all that?

[josh22_22]

try watching or learning about relativity when your shrooms or weed.
it will really make u think.

[MelT]

Originally Posted by JcP

Rev, did you happen to figure out why we are stuck in this manifestation? Why we have a mind and all that?

As some here will have already found, there are a number of different depths to the experience, though I don't mean to imply by this that one experience is more important than another. At a 'lower' end there is a sense of sunyata, a feeling of the non-duality of reality and its co-dependant nature. This is very much like what some describe here as a feeling of spacious stillness. The higher you go the more the experience also contains 'super-knowledges', which are understandings concerning the nature of life and death, time, reality itself, etc, but seen not from the POV of the individual but actually as the whole of reality and beyond, seeing and feeling it as 'god' (a totally inapt word for what you become). In Hinduism this experience is usually termed 'cosmic consciousness'. This is an important aspect of understanding the nature of enlightenment, it isn't just a state and a set of feelings, but at its culmination, actual knowledge concerning the true nature of reality. No understanding, no enlightenment. But the lower experiences are still valid and useful without this knowledge, still tremendously powerful. I was lucky enough to experience sunyata a couple of times, then a cosmic consciousness about 7 years later after changing my meditational form to that of Mahamudra and Dzogchen.

But to the questions above IF - and it is a big if, no matter what truth I personally feel is in the experience - we Buddhists and Hindus are correct then the answers are very hard to put over without giving the wrong impression, but let me try to explain in a very general way:

This entire reality is a non-duality - or more accurately, a not-two-ness. Imagine reality as being a limitless sea. Waves arise and fall on its surface, and we might be tempted to conceptualise these waves as objects with their own individual nature. But the waves have never been anything other than the sea. In the same way, this reality is 'basic space' (a term for ultimate reality) with movements within it coming and going, which appear to us to be objects, people, time and space. Again though, these movements are never anything other than what they seem to have arisen from. There's a 'one-ness' here, a co-dependent set of phenomena which is always Basic Space.

This doesn't mean though that things don't exist, it merely shows that things don't exist in the way we commonly believe, that reality is a state of flux and constantly open. Though you'd really need to study eastern esoteria to understand the implications of this fully and realise why it is true, if you can accept the above provisionally, it means that we aren't stuck in a manifestation, there are no individual minds to become lost in the first place. Everybody is already free in their true nature, already an expression of ultimate reality. We can neither move towards or away from our ultimate nature, we are forever it. This is why there's a saying in some forms of Buddhism that 'a monk leaves home seeking a jewel (enlightenment) that's hidden in the hem of his coat' - ie, that there's no need to go anywhere to find your ultimate nature.

Once you move away from the moralistic methods of meditational forms like Mahyana, meditation changes from being concentrative exercises to - on the whole - simply understanding your actual nature in the correct way, as above. This is a remarkably rapid way of pregressing along the Path, as it puts you in a 'realised' state of understanding as soon as you begin to practise.

Sorry, that was much longer than I'd intended, but I hope it might answer some questions

M

[JcP]

M, my question doesn't concern what reality "actually" is.

My question is why humanity is born into a world seemingly inept at understanding this...and more importantly, why comprehending oneself requires work? Shouldn't recognizing yourself and the nature of things be something an 8 year old should be able to do? Why does it require such unbelievable dedication?

To put it simply: why the illusions?

[The Rev]

JcP, it's really hard to say. I didn't get any revelation-type knowledge that I could "bring back", so to speak, and share with others. As far as illusions go, I only have my theories about that all too human habit of mistaking subjective experience for objective, and acting on it.

In fact, the memory of that "feeling" or "experience" is kinda vague, now. I know I saw something incredible, with my mind pulled away, but it's not something my mind can put together in its own terms (language and concepts). That's a fucked up thing, too, because, personally, I have always gotten pissed off at spiritual insider types who seem to brush off serious questions with, "Yo man, it's not something that can be reduced to words" etc. and I hate to seem like one of those guys.



The Rev

[Canuck Wisdom]

Yes Rev, I would recommend to anyone that they check out Bill Hicks work, its all good.

And JcP, I only skimmed some of the last posts, but if I could take a stab why we're here in this way. To grow. Or, if growth is only because we are encapsulated like this; to grow into manifesting in the infinite in the limited. As a part of the infinite it must infinitely grow (better, enhance, enlighten, experience) the finite (or it wouldn't be the infinite everything/base).

Maybe?

[Waves]

Originally Posted by JcP

M, my question doesn't concern what reality "actually" is.

My question is why humanity is born into a world seemingly inept at understanding this...and more importantly, why comprehending oneself requires work? Shouldn't recognizing yourself and the nature of things be something an 8 year old should be able to do? Why does it require such unbelievable dedication?

To put it simply: why the illusions?

i think 8 year olds see the nature of things much more clearly than ourselves

we are complicators. we take simple things and complicate them. it takes unbelievable dedication because people believe that unbelievable dedication is required for such serious matters. i laugh at that. im a simple guy

[ziplock]

Originally Posted by JcP

Shouldn't recognizing yourself and the nature of things be something an 8 year old should be able to do?

Are you implying that it is something an 8 year old isn't able to do? I would ask what lead you to believe that?

[JcP]

Originally Posted by ziplock

Are you implying that it is something an 8 year old isn't able to do? I would ask what lead you to believe that?

If you know of any 8 year olds who know the answer to the question(s) I asked above, please tell me so I can get in contact with him/her.

At 8 years old, I was still worried about wearing the right slap-on bracelet and fearful of vampires. Maybe I'm the exception.

[JcP]

Originally Posted by Waves

we are complicators.

Why? Why is this world condusive to complications?