If I boil this down, there is a familiar, and tiresome, challenge here - Is Jim's enlightenment real? Specifically his reports of 24/7 silence? Can the two even be equated?
Here is my esteemed answer: Who cares? I don't. I've written volumes about my experience, far more than the snippet below. Knock yourself out dude, trying to prove my enlightenment, one way or the other. My point has always been that enlightenment is achievable, by anyone, using the techniques of TM and the TM Sidhis. If I can do it, anyone can. Enlightenment is a natural state of consciousness. That's the point. Now, stay on point - ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : This is in regard to the faux enlightenment call that Barry makes in regard to Jim. Now I do not know what Barry experiences, or what Jim experiences, but Barry always seems to me more in control of what he says than Jim. At any rate the exchanges between these two would not probably pass muster as a discussion that had anything to do with enlightenment, but Barry is not claiming that this is what it is about, while Jim seems to be promoting the exchange as a demonstration of enlightenment (Jim) versus ignorance (Barry). Jim said the following (emphasis in the original): "Enlightenment" is simply defined as life, accompanied by eternal and deep silence, Being, during any state of consciousness. End of story. There are no automatic attributes beyond that, as the universe takes care of the rest. Anyone can gain enlightenment, and with that, their individuality will always express enlightenment. To try for some sort of personal algorithm beyond that, is a fool's errand; better to focus on your own path, than try to come up with any comprehensive list of personal attributes. Silence in activity, always. Period. In the following the first four paragraphs are an edited down version of an essay by a Vedantist. The rather short attention span of most of the readers on FFL is the reason for the edits. 'Many teachers promote one of the most famous myths, that silence is somehow the ultimate teaching. While understanding the nature of the self in silence apparently finishes seeking for a few individuals, silence is certainly not superior to the skillful use of words in bringing about enlightenment. This is so because silence is in harmony, not in conflict, with self ignorance, as it is with everything.' 'One can sit in silence without instruction for lifetimes and never realize that one is the silence. Knowledge, however, which is a legitimate means of knowledge, destroys self ignorance like light destroys darkness. Additionally no experience, including the experience of silence, can change thinking patterns.' 'An experience of non-duality may temporarily suspend thought or increase one's resolve to see oneself as limitless awareness, but the notion that the "I" is limited, inadequate, incomplete and separate is hard wired. It is only by diligent practice of the knowledge "I am limitless, ordinary awareness and not this body-mind" that the mind's understanding of reality gets in line with the nature of the self.' 'Why are binding desires such a major problem for anyone seeking enlightenment? Because they disturb the mind to such a degree that contact with the self as it reflects in the mind is broken, making self inquiry impossible. It is contemplation on the reflection of the self in the mind that allows the intellect to investigate the self in line with the teachings of self inquiry and gain the knowledge "I am the self." Some notes here: Anyone who happens to be a Buddhist needs to substitute another word for self in the above discussion, as the central feature of Buddhism is there is no self, meaning the individual self, person, that people think they are. Whereas in the above discussion, self refers to unbounded awareness. Now in Maharishi's schema, transcendental consciousness cannot count as unbounded awareness because in TC you have no thought and the concept 'unbounded awareness' cannot be formulated, the concept is formulated once back in ordinary waking as a description of that state as it is remembered and compared to waking. Cosmic consciousness, also in Maharishi's scheme, is silence that accompanies activity, but it is walled off from the activity, so this cannot be unbounded awareness either, as it does not penetrate into the world of the senses, it is bound by this separation, and neither does more enhanced sensory experience add anything to the equation. Now even unity, where objects are appreciated in terms of 'I', that sense of 'I am that' still shows a lingering sense of separated identity, fragmentation, and decoherence of experience, otherwise it would not be necessary to say there is an "I" in relation to 'that'. For experience to be 'unbounded' the essential value of existence has to be equally present at every aspect of experience all the time as that experience. This is actually a no brainer, because ignorant or enlightened, the essential value of existence is always present as the experience, so it is something one has always known. That is, enlightenment does not bring anything new into experience. The things you do to get enlightened obviously do have a sometimes profound influence on experience, but enlightenment itself is nothing new under the sun. It is also open to question whether the silence ascribed to enlightenment is really silence. The absence or reduction of mind chatter, does not necessarily indicate one is enlightened, there are many situations that can lead to the mind stopping and yet self ignorance remains. Partial awakening experiences can do this, and while they reveal to the mind something of the nature of enlightenment, they are not complete, and ignorance in the form of ego can continue to promote itself under the banner of enlightenment, which has not occurred, but which the mind mistakenly assumes has happened. Whatever experiences one has had, to become the knowledge that is called enlightenment, those experiences and their understanding have to be assimilated by the mind to the extent that the mind has that knowledge always available during whatever experience might be happening, because all the pre-existing states one has experienced prior, however grand they might have seemed, are past history, they are not there to interpret the currently happening experience. Were I to characterise Barry, I would say he is a terrorist in Beliefland. A belief is the pretence you know something you do not know, an opinion, an idea not supported by facts, unlike an informed belief which is more of an hypothesis that can stand additional testing. Like balloons floating in Disney World, mere beliefs, even if tightly held, are airy ideas that have no substance, and Barry is the pin that attempts to pop the pretence. He seems to me quite aware of the pernicious effects of mere opinion. My beliefs, your beliefs, it does not matter to him. Popping beliefs is not always successful, as beliefs may have very tough hides. I would say regarding beliefs about enlightenment, that one of the worse is the idea that it can make you better than someone else. Because everyone has exactly 100% of what is required for enlightenment, this is not really possible. Because beliefs are the primary shield of the ego, and the ego is a fragile fiction itself, the attempt to pry beliefs away is at the very least annoying to the ego, and at worst terrifying, but here on FFL it is seldom, perhaps never, that anything resembling the level of terror would arise from such a process because everyone is mostly privately separated in time and distance and only assailable through text and occasionally pictures. So here on FFL, if someone says x and says this is striking terror into the heart of y, its baloney because it is not really threatening to the ego in this situation. What Barry needs is an isolation chamber with some additional accessories to put his subjects in so that their imaginary world could be more subtlety disassembled. That's not going to happen, so FFL will continue to be largely a forum where people complain about other people on the basis of whatever opinion is floating in the mind at the time, and Barry will highlight that particular stupid opinion, and the complaints will start flying. And what is my interest in all this? I am arbitrarily taking sides, without stepping too far off the centre line. Since Barry is described as down and out, barely hanging on, I view this as a medical intervention even if the supposed ailment is a mistaken diagnosis, and I have no doctoral skills on top of that. Since I have the gift of prophesy, based on the observation of habitual occurrences, I predict Barry will continue to do what he does best, and that is almost absolute.
