--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "jim_flanegin" <jflanegi@> > wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_reply@> wrote: > > > You're enlightened, and you refuse to even *think* > > > that you might not be. Did I get that right, Jim? > > > > You are missing what I and many others have already said again > > and again here. Enlightenment is not experienced on the level > > of thinking. It is a state of Being. This is not my original > > expression-- All of the gurus and spiritual teachers say this > > also. Given your background, I am surprised that you don't > > know this yet. Your level of ignorance astounds me.:-) > > It's a little like accusing somebody of refusing > even to *think* they might be dreaming rather > than awake. When you're awake, it's self-evident > you aren't dreaming. (Not "self-evident" meaning > "obvious," but rather evident in terms of itself.)
Ever heard of hallucination? Or delusion? Clinically deluded people see things and believe things about their perceptions -- things that are self-evident to them -- every day that are more correctly categorized as dreams, or at the very least dreamlike. The first step to helping these people separate what is real in their perceptions and what is not is getting them to do a little self inquiry, to ask themselves if there is a *possibility* that they are not real. Until that happens, in an extreme case involving waking hallucinations and delusions, no progress can be made. (Other than with, say, drugs.) Now make the mental leap to those following spiritual paths who are so convinced that their perceptions are correct, and that their enlightenment is "self-evident" that they are unable to question, even theoretically, that they might be something else. I know that you haven't been around the block much, spiritually, but if you had you might have run into a few people who believed themselves enlightened who turned out to be delusional, and were later committed to institutions as a result of those delusions. You might have run into people who had convinced themselves -- and others -- that they were fully enlightened, and then self-destructed in some other way. Think Andy Rhymer. Think Frederick Lenz/ Rama, whom you probably *don't* consider enlightened. He certainly considered himself to be. I know for sure that his state of consciousness was self-evident to him, and yet he ended up as crab food, a suicide. *Without a doubt*, these people's enlightenment was self-evident to them. There was no question in their minds that it existed. But did it? I'm just sayin' that there is a big "red flag" raised for me when someone believes one of their "stories" so completely that they seem *unable* to even *entertain* the idea that it might not be true. Haven't you ragged on me for years to examine my experiences of seeing someone levitate, to see if there might be another way of seeing the experience, and see if it might not be true? ( As if I hadn't already done this hundreds of times before I ever ran into you. :-) Yet when Jim refuses to even *consider* examining his enlightenment, even if it's just theoretical and for fun, you defend him and claim that I'm accusing him of something. Hmmmm. :-) The Byron Katie fans here seem to be saying that it's a good thing to utilize some of her techniques to analyze their "stories" to see if they're true. And yet there is one story of their own that is somehow "exempt" from analysis. Hmmmm.
