--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, akasha_108 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [SNIP] > That Awareness is expressed in the lifes of all in infinite ways is of > little surprise. However, what I was seeking to confirm (or refute if > there is no confirmation -- same process) is that there is some > commonality to the so called experience of so called awakening. As a > rough analogy, while all humans are unique and different, there are > are core features of commonality that allow them to be classified as > homo-sapiens. [SNIP TO END]
*** I like to think that there is one underlying reality that all forms and expressions of enlightenment take part in. That may be asking too much, but I'd like to take it as a starting point. Then, the question arises, within that reality, how much room is there for variation of experience that could meaningfully be called "awakened" or "enlightened"? Some differences may be accounted for by people being at various "stages". Thus, for example, you could have some speak of the world of change as unreal. While this sounds like a fairly advanced perception, it may be a reflection of the Self/Non-Self duality that M. associates with CC. Others might speak of the world of change as utterly real, and seamlessly connected to the unchanging, which sounds more like a UC perception. One confounding factor brought out in various autobiographical accounts is that "awakened" states may be experienced at first as "ultimate" because they all have some quality of unboundedness, infinity, immortality about them; whereas, it is only in retrospect that they may be recognized as transitional states moving on to more "awakenings". But all of this presupposes that there is one more or less general outcome (with many minor variations) for everyone who is destined to "awaken". That could be a false assumption. If we take it that advanced practitioners of many spiritual traditions have "attained" to the states that they define as awakened, how are we to account for the variances in description? Is some of this just a problem of trying to describe the ineffable? Would all of these people agree with each other about their states (if not their descriptions of them) if they sat down and talked to each other, as Dr. Pete has suggested? Or are there possibly fundamentally different "realized" states? For example, could it be that the Hindus experience "Self- realization" while Buddhists speak of there being no Self (big S or little), because these are different experiences of the underlying truth? I ran across an example of this the other day. I read a book by Ted Strauss, who used to be a TM teacher and now teaches with the Waking Down people. He describes two different states which he claims are at the same "level" of realization, but are experienced quite differently. These are CC-like experiences. He claims to have had both. The first he calls something like "disembodied witness consciousness" and the second he calls something like "embodied witness consciousness". He considers the former to be what has traditionally been understood to be "Self-realization" and the latter to be much more rare. While he says that the two are equivalent as a realization of the Self as unbounded and uninvolved in any and all activity, he considers the latter to be superior, and the speciality of the Waking Down approach (naturally he considers it superior, since he is part of that "tradition"). I actually don't know what he is talking about, but found the concepts interesting. Is there anyone on FFL who has enough experience of Waking Down to comment on this? a To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
