---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Nisargadatta Maharaj: The seeker is he who is in search of himself. Soon he discovers that his own body he cannot be. Once the conviction: 'I am not the body' becomes so well grounded that he can no longer feel, think and act for and on behalf of the body, he will easily discover that he is the universal being, knowing, acting, that in him and through him the entire universe is real, conscious and active.
CDB: Believing that we are not the body is refuted by death itself. What he is describing sounds more like clinical dissociation than an exalted state worth pursuing. X: Curtis, it is really difficult to explain what N is talking about, it is a shift in one's sense of identity. It decentralises from the body. This does not mean there is some entity that moves out of the body. The sense one has of being awareness after meditating for a while as if diffuses completely and becomes the environment of the universe (not promoting any particular technique here). Eventually the realisation comes it was always this way, so nothing really happened. It feels like waking up from a dream. In a sense it is waking up from your idea of individuality, body, mind, thought now seem as if they are part of the environment, no different than anything else in the universe. The functions of nature we call laws continue to function the same way, nature is in control, the body has a limited sense of control, you can pick up a cup of coffee, but not lift a mountain. N:G: This is the heart of the problem. Either you are body-conscious and a slave of circumstances, or you are the universal consciousness itself -- and in full control of every event. CDB: This is a grandiose claim isn't it? Who is in full control of every even and who is pompous enough to WANT to be? Many of life's delights are in being surprised by stuff we have not control over for good reason. X: Sounds grandiose, but all that has happened is the mind has let go and surrendered to the natural progress of the world, which includes body, mind, and thoughts. When the body dies, the world comes to an end, the mechanisms of experience no longer function. To an impacted sense of individuality this whole thing sounds like disassociation, but everything is really just fine, and the world becomes an intimate part of experience in reference to awareness rather than in something we are in as physical objects. Saying the world is somehow 'in us' sounds kind of strange. That is only one way of saying it. Language is a significant barrier because it is being used to describe an aspect of experience that is beyond words. So 'we', from the viewpoint of the body, can still be surprised by things, because the body does not know anything more about the world than it did before, but all those of years of meditation, getting one's ego challenged, and continual curiosity about what life is about, basically have the effect of shifting the mind's perspective away from the idea of being an individual entity to just being without a sense of having a real centre. But it does not look different, and one's activities are not different. The difference with this thing called 'enlightenment' is just that little mental shift of understanding: everything looks, feels, and acts just like in ordinary waking, because it is just that, with just that overlay of conceptual thinking regulated to a secondary reality; the intellect no longer defines reality and tells us what is real, but we can still use intellect to analyse experience and try to describe it. It is all utterly unremarkable. Why it gets blown up to such grandiose verbosity is a continual problem. Part of the problem with Indian systems is they tend to sound ambiguous because of the use of the word translated as 'self' in different ways. I think Buddha was a bit more direct in saying there is no self. The self you think you are is just a bundle of impressions that one has tied a nice ribbon around called 'me'. When the ribbon gets untied, the impressions and everything else remain the same, but the mind now knows that that bundle of stuff was not an entity, was not a self, it was just a collection of stuff we gave a name to; now we see these things as being independent of that conception.
