ZenSkin

Hey!
Now when the reality between dawns upon me I will let go of the hallucinations of instinctive terror
Enter the recognition of all objects as my mind's own visions
And understand this as the pattern of perception in the between;
Come to this moment, arrived at this most critical cessation I will not fear my own visions of deities mild and fierce!

This is the sort of stuff that makes my boat float. I am interested in discussing it with like minded seekers.

Is death the moment we understand the in between -- the place between all duality? Is that nirvana? Is the "Coming into the mother light" experential or purely mystical? Is the book a simple reflection a Tibetan Buddhist belief with a mix of native anamism or does it inform that belief system with the writings of sages? What does it tell us about out Western traditions?

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Honk if you don't exist

supermarket :)

After reading DMT: The Spirit Molecule, my perception on life itself changed.


Is life truly , what I believe is the core of buddhist teaching, all our illusion. I don't necessarily mean visually, but come on - the visual aspect of our reality is VERY small, although to the unaware, it may seem like thats our reality.

through meditation, we realize our reality is our fears, our bias, our opinions, and our thoughts and emotions - add together our SIX senses and you have our perceptive reality.


Does this , then mean that we truly do control our lives. If so, whos to say we dont also control whats after our lives, by our choices?

What im getting at, is that the mind is a very complex tool - and i think it filters reality the way we recieve it, to suit our needs. we dont really know how to use the tool yet in this day and age, but soon we will figure it out.

ZenSkin

[quote]Originally posted by supermarket:
<strong>through meditation, we realize our reality is our fears, our bias, our opinions, and our thoughts and emotions - add together our SIX senses and you have our perceptive reality.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Self is the ultimate illusion. The six sense fields fade away in the Bardo state (the death state). One is between all opposites. In our waking consciousness we discriminate between good and evil, between light and dark, between wanting and rejecting. The Book if the Dead is Padmasambhava's revelation of the coming into the between. The experience of physical and mental death which exposes the ego to clear light of ultimate reality (which is nothingness). Nothingness is not the absence of thought, but the absence of discrimination.

I am not surprised that you thought about these ideas while reading about DMT. I remember an old hippy telling me about kundalini meditation and comparing the experience of the opening of the shashumna (central meridian) to the expereince of tripping on DMT. I thought immediately of the expereince I had with a Tibetan Guru who taught a meditation of phowa .. described in the Book of the Dead. A meditation where one imagines consciousness as a ball of radiant light at the heart chakra and through a particular tantric evocation, moves one's consciousness out of the 7th chakra (at the top of the head) into the blue body of Amithaba ... the Buddha of the Western Paradise.

This is the really really deep stuff. The discussion of the nature of mind. The evolution of consciousness. The dissolution of self.

Padmasambhava's revelation isn't strictly Buddhist or Tantric. It is a revelation about human potential and evolution. The Eighth century saw a change in human consciousness and not only did Padmasambhava offer a revelation about mind and transition but the world saw a leap in the human species that the scientific community will eventually catagorize as the time when the human species first thought "I".

What is the next phase?

I believe it will be an intergration of the opposites. Humans will naturally see grey area between apparent opposites and the old ideas of "self" and "other" will disolve. Padmasambhava already told of this dissolution. So have users of DMT and LSD (myself included :-)

Hmmm a lot to talk about ... I gotta smoke another bowl and forget how to type for a while.

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Honk if you don't exist