--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sinhlnx" <sinhlnx@> wrote: > > > > ---Consider an apartment as a type of cage. Could a person > > only "think" the apartment is real, but really be living inside > > Mae West's head? > > > > http://www.planetperplex.com/en/item203 > > > > Or, Jim, you were fortunate in realizing you were in a cage. So I > > guess the people living in the cage but don't know it are > > in "ignorant Bliss"?....kind of like the people living in the > > Matrix > > world while the aliens are sucking out the juices from their real > > bodies. > > Or perhaps Jim is living locked in the cage of "Enlightenment World" > -- perhaps not knowing he is caged, all the while thinking he is > boundlessly free.
Or, having made the mistake of announcing that he is realized/enlightened, now he's stuck in the cage of pretending that he is. I guess that's the same thing you mean by "enlightenment world." I can't say fersure, of course, but it's certainly a possibility. I've seen the same phenomenon before in many different spiritual trips. Someone has a neat experience of realization -- a *real* experience of realization -- and, because they assume that once they have such an experience it will be permanent, they announce to the world their enlightenment. Some of them even set themselves up as spiritual teachers or gurus at this point. And then the experience fades. What's a guru to do? An honest one would go to his students and say, "Oops, I was wrong." One who was a little less honest, espec- ially with himself, would pretend that the experience of realization was still going on. An even less honest one would indulge in self deception, and convince him- self that it was still going on. Once you've had a couple of these realization exper- iences, it's pretty easy to "talk the talk" of them. Few can tell whether you're talkin' from present exper- ience or past experience, because you *are* talkin' from experience. So it's actually a fairly common phenomenon in the larger community of spiritual trips and seekers to see people milking a transitory exper- ience of realization for years or decades after it has gone away or faded. Not to say that's what's going on here on FFL, but it could be. Because such things *aren't* talked about much in the TMO, but are known about and talked about openly in other spiritual trips, I just thought I'd bring up the possibility.
