Some clarification on SE?

I think there is an expectation to a lot of people, including myself when I was 'almost there' that the cool, massively amazing non-dual states were going to become the default when you wake up. Not the case for me. At least not yet

Russell wrote: I think there is an expectation to a lot of people, including myself when I was 'almost there' that the cool, massively amazing non-dual states were going to become the default when you wake up. Not the case for me. At least not yet

That's sort of how it's sold. But since we've firmly established that it isn't the same for everyone. What is it then and how could one possible know they have it if it's always different? Have we established any commonality here?

The more I read these accounts, the more I think I've got it, but mostly because of an underlying theme that I can't quite put my finger on, not because my experience lines up with another. It's the "I get it" factor that "I" am not at all what I thought I was and now that is obvious and true, unshakably so. "I" am just clearly a dream. The depths to which I experience that regularly are besides the point, it is the Knowledge of it that is the marker on the path, the first obvious opening of the way.

Is that right?

I think that's a very practical way of looking at it. For one thing, if clearly 'seeing' the way things are is the first opening, or entering the way, then walking the way has a built in guide-- that which is 'seen' is the guide for cultivation. This should feel like a bit of a let down in some sense-- you can stop 'searching' for something bigger and better. Just return to the clear seeing again and again, give yourself opportunities to let it be that simple and clear, naturally , for glimpses.

The way continues and is fed by returning to what has been seen, not in the sense of returning to a particular experience, but in the sense of re-turning to and appreciating the true nature of that which is 'seen'. That's why in the five path system (hehehe!) SE is called the path of seeing, and it is followed by the path of cultivation-- cultivating what was seen. That's the heart of it in my experience. Let that glimpse of the true nature of things become the guide. Follow that. Deepen that. Soak in appreciation of that like soaking in a bath. See the true nature especially of thoughts/feelings/behaviors which are disturbing. Use the forge of experience in daily life to refine the view of true nature. Set aside some time to sit quietly and appreciate that clear seeing. Now you have that clarity that withstands your own and others' doubts. That's a real teacher there. Follow it deeper

Chris Marti wrote: Well, my ability to access non-dual awareness showed up one day and has stayed with me ever since. I'm not sure it's even something that evolves all that much over time. I mean, it is what it is, so to speak. So maybe we're not referring to the same thing...

EDIT: for me it is the ability to see that things, experiences, the world, is perceivable as either a relative or an absolute. I can choose the basis on which to view the world thusly, but that ability, that VIEW, is what appeared as if by magic one day and has been available since. It was quite a revelation when it happened. I was giddy for days afterward, and it changed fundamentally my relationship to the world in which I find myself.

This mirrors my experience. One of the startling revelations upon waking up was that even non-dual perception was fabricated - it wasn't any more real or valid than subject/object awareness. Maybe this was obvious to some of you and not an issue. But this caused some serious doubt for me - why would I choose that? It took a while to realize that it was just as "true" as subject/object perception and since it conditions peace in a way the latter does not, it's a very useful view, which shows us the reality of our experience in a way the default mode of perception cannot.

A couple of months ago I discovered that if I contemplate the nature of awareness in a certain way, non-dual perception can be induced. But I'm content to just let that operate in the background - going around contemplating the nature of consciousness constantly is cumbersome and limiting actually. In that regard, it can just arise when it will from time to time.

jake wrote: I think that's a very practical way of looking at it. For one thing, if clearly 'seeing' the way things are is the first opening, or entering the way, then walking the way has a built in guide-- that which is 'seen' is the guide for cultivation. This should feel like a bit of a let down in some sense-- you can stop 'searching' for something bigger and better. Just return to the clear seeing again and again, give yourself opportunities to let it be that simple and clear, naturally , for glimpses.

The way continues and is fed by returning to what has been seen, not in the sense of returning to a particular experience, but in the sense of re-turning to and appreciating the true nature of that which is 'seen'. That's why in the five path system (hehehe!) SE is called the path of seeing, and it is followed by the path of cultivation-- cultivating what was seen. That's the heart of it in my experience. Let that glimpse of the true nature of things become the guide. Follow that. Deepen that. Soak in appreciation of that like soaking in a bath. See the true nature especially of thoughts/feelings/behaviors which are disturbing. Use the forge of experience in daily life to refine the view of true nature. Set aside some time to sit quietly and appreciate that clear seeing. Now you have that clarity that withstands your own and others' doubts. That's a real teacher there. Follow it deeper

So that's it eh? Well. Guess I'll go play some Starcraft now:)

I think I now officially have very little idea what anyone is talking about.

So here's my fuss about "nondual awareness". So if in a moment of a nondual experience, one knows, directly and personally, that subject/object is an illusion, fine. Now after that, I will put money on you being able to remember that vividly, that lesson learned, much as one never again looks at a bee the same way after being stung. It changes everything. BUT, you are not freely accessing a nondual experience. 'Awareness' here is being thrown around as a term that implies a personal knowledge, realization or wisdom, but not perception, right? Much as I may vividly remember the bee sting and everything it implies about how the world works, and that changes my life, but I am not actually constantly having a bee on my hand with it's stinger embedded 24/7.

Make sense? Probably not.

duane_eugene_miller wrote: So where are the markers for the "Enlightenment" and how does one know one is "done"? Or is there even a done and is Enlightenment really a thing that can be quantified? Is it really just knowledge of reality?

That really is almost unanswerable, it seems. If I had to define enlightenment as briefly as possible I guess I'd say it is a thorough seeing that self is just another set of perceptions. The key word is "thorough" however. We can see this quite clearly in a pre-path A&P, and this knowledge reasserts itself from time to time on the "lower" paths - but at those stages we're still searching, still looking for the holy grail. When the awakening is big enough or deep enough this search ends and in my case at least, it left me wondering "now what?" This can be dramatic (raises hand) or gradual and subtle, depending on the person - or so it seems to me. There is a definite and "permanent" set of changes as Ona suggests. It's like before enlightenment we're driving the car with our foot on the gas pedal, and afterward we're on cruise control - but we still have to pay attention.

So here's my fuss about "nondual awareness". So if in a moment of a nondual experience, one knows, directly and personally, that subject/object is an illusion, fine. Now after that, I will put money on you being able to remember that vividly, that lesson learned, much as one never again looks at a bee the same way after being stung. It changes everything. BUT, you are not freely accessing a nondual experience. 'Awareness' here is being thrown around as a term that implies a personal knowledge, realization or wisdom, but not perception, right? Much as I may vividly remember the bee sting and everything it implies about how the world works, and that changes my life, but I am not actually constantly having a bee on my hand with it's stinger embedded 24/7.

Make sense? Probably not.

Makes sense to me.

Ona Kiser wrote: BUT, you are not freely accessing a nondual experience.

No, it's not like flipping a switch for me, sorry if that's what I seemed to imply. I have to actively contemplate - and probably have to be fairly clear to start with. Still, it doesn't take a more than a moment to move toward it just by pausing and seeing what's going on - usually.

Is it possible that there IS [inherently] no true "non-dual state" or even "non-dual experience"-- there is only the insight that reality is non-dual, except as a convenient CONCEPT [for some purposes].

In other words, we dissect an integral reality, using conceptual mind, in order to understand how parts of it work. When we manage to stop doing that for a bit, it often feels tremendously liberating-- and it is! -- liberating to discover how much more scope we can have: we don't have to be stuck in the mode that promotes conflict, gross or subtle.

But if we impose the concept "non-duality" as a lens, it insures a subtle duality between duality and non-duality. Distinctly NOT liberating: as Chris has noted elsewhere-- fixation is anti-awakening, anti-liberating.

Mike Ramos wrote:

Ona Kiser wrote: BUT, you are not freely accessing a nondual experience.

No, it's not like flipping a switch for me, sorry if that's what I seemed to imply. I have to actively contemplate - and probably have to be fairly clear to start with. Still, it doesn't take a more than a moment to move toward it just by pausing and seeing what's going on - usually.

It has been like flipping a switch for me. I've read Chris's account of what it was for him and that's what it was for me, only the ability to access it hasn't lasted. Adyashanti talks about abiding vs. non-abiding awakening. Mine was non-abiding, but it was awakening. It was a huge, big wow. It was scary and then it was wonderful. And I Want It Back (craving). I have talked about it numerous time in numerous contexts on these forums. I can't really imagine awakening as being anything else. "I" went away. There was no one there. Things manifested with no intrinsic meaning or value in relation to a subject. I was gone. Yet nowadays what I am experiencing is a thinning out of the sense of self. I can tap into it at will by paying attention. That tapping into it is a kind of pointing exercise for me, a stopping of the stream of non-awareness and letting things be. But "I" am still there to an extent, doing it.

EDIT: I wasn't the one flipping the switch; something switched on its own. I didn't switch it back off again either, it went away on its own.

Kate Gowen wrote:
But if we impose the concept "non-duality" as a lens, it insures a subtle duality between duality and non-duality. Distinctly NOT liberating.

Yeah Kate, I'm with you, I'm not sure I am totally following this tangent that the thread has taken down the road of separating duality and nonduality into distinct states. For me, nonduality is just the nature of experience. whether the content of experience is 'oneness' or 'manyness'. Nonduality isn't a state or experience. It is what is, revealed without views conditioning the View.

Once it has been seen clearly enough to un-see the previous default views (SE) then it just needs to deepen.
It's definitely not a special state, or experience. That's why talk of attainment can be confusing; the deepening is a loss of false views not the gaining of a special state.

Thinking, feeling, sensing, acting, remembering, relating, even engaging deep reactions... is all part of nondual reality. there's no escape. We can create as many lines as we want in order to create a search out of experience. Or we can drop that game and deepen into what is. That's my take anyhow

But what if there is a non-dual state, a non-dual experience? I don't think fixation on any state or experience is liberating either, but to say there's no such thing doesn't conform to my experience. I would not in a million years know what it was without having been there. Just imagining, conceptualizing, or talking about it, or even having insight about it, would not approach being there (or more to the point, not being there).

I'm not trying to say "My enlightenment is better than your enlightenment." But it's hard for me to grasp what awakening is if it's not awakening to a direct experience of the emptiness of phenomena, including self. When you, Kate, talked on another thread about laughing over feeling like an old lady who was looking in her purse for the glasses she was already wearing, that sounds like another way of expressing it to me.

Hi Laurel!
What you say makes sense to me. What I've noticed is that there is something crucially different about recognizing/appreciating/seeing clearly the nondual nature, and not recognizing/not appreciating/not seeing clearly. But what has happened over time is that, like a snake, I have shed skin after skin... each skin being a certain paradigm of what defines that crucial difference.

Each skin was a dualistic view about nonduality; a project for engineering experience into an ongoing nondual experience, defined by some sort of phenomenal conditions (as in, certain things needed to be present and/or absent in experience in order to 'reveal' the nondual).

But the funny thing is that increasingly it becomes clear that even not recognizing/not appreciating/not seeing clearly is not the opposite of nondual clarity. I know that to some people that sounds hopelessly silly, if not outright bullshit even.

Still, there you go. And if you find this compelling or have had hints in your own experience, I find it fruitful to investigate the beliefs we have about this very topic. What is the 'difference' between nonduality and duality? Are you sure there is one?

My experience shows me directly that recognizing/not recognizing is a false dichotomy. But what the f*ck does that mean lol? I have no idea!!! Good thing reality doesn't have to make sense

This is a good further clarification Kate, Laurel, and Jake, thanks. For my part, I'm going to walk back what I said about it up thread. I thought about it some more while out for a stroll and I realized that I hadn't even understood Chris's statement, much less Ona's follow up. I was also mistaken about the conditions for “inducing” non-dual awareness/perception – implying that “I” was somehow in control of it. Having another deluded day, what can I say.

I think this is possibly the world's most confusing thread. But to address something Laurel said:

When I had what was noted by my teacher as an A&P, when I had various "path fruitions," the moment I woke up, when I had a fruition-like experience Friday: those were intense non-dual experiences. Like there was literally nothing separate from anything. Those experiences lasted a few seconds, followed by a kind of reverie for a few hours and some ongoing wowza for a few days. In between, I have never been in such a "state" in an ongoing way. BUT they always left an indelible mark, something changed in my understanding of how things work, something deeply changed in my relationship to who I am and how reality works.

Each one was like the tearing away of a veil that brought a deeper level of clear seeing. That clear seeing, that wisdom, realization stayed. The "shock and awe holy shit what the fuck moment" did NOT stay.

I think a lot of people have those brief intense experiences and think "wow, when I finally have another one...someday, the Big One, then I will be in that really intense state of amazingness nonstop all day long forever!" I don't know anyone for whom that is true, although there may be people out there for whom it is true.

Now if I were to take the "me" who had that first experience and somehow transport that person forward in time to my present mode of perception, it might well be that they would go "holy fucking shit" and pass out with the shock of it. Because how I experience day to day existence now is probably very different from then. But my relationship to it is one of having gradually gotten used to things like a kind of beauty in the world, a sense of pervasive love, a deep peace and stillness in the mind, the sense of being deeply connected to all beings, a sense of boundlessness and openness "inside me" and so on. But it's not like some kind of endless fruition moment that extends forever. It's more like I just don't have the inclination to kill insects, and I adore being gentle with people, and I love the strange quirks and messes of the world, and I feel a lot of sweetness and joy, I tend to want to hug a lot. I cry a lot, in a tears of joy and awe way. But those things grew, too - I didn't feel all that right after waking up. Things seem to continue falling away, bit by bit, rarely with any kind of big bang, but just in a slow, unnoticed way, a little here a little there. I feel different now than I did in December. I felt different in December than I did last July...

So when people say "nondual awareness" is ongoing, my understanding is that they mean the knowledge, the recognition is there. Not that they are in a state similar to what one experiences during a big shift, where one might have big immersive wowza moment, and that they just stay there in that state ongoing.

If someone's experience is other than this, please feel free to share!!

I don't know if you guys have seen this, but it's actually pretty cool:

www.adyashanti.org/library/The_Way_of_Liberation_Ebook.pdf

He's giving it away free. Anyhow, it's very succinct. Duane, a lot about how you've described your process reminds me of the teaching in this short book. There is a section on 'core practices', which are three in his teaching: meditation, contemplation, and inquiry. It's a pretty useful break-down and another approach to awakening, 'being done', and the process that unfolds; but one that takes 'being done' as the beginning of the process, not the end. It's cool cause it integrates the 'already there' view directly with a developmental process, which is more true to my experience than putting them side by side as complementary alternatives or favoring one or the other in an either/or way.

@Jake, I do think there's something to be said for "being done" actually being the beginning of something productive and useful. You've gotten all the bullshit out of the way, and now you can move forward with a life that is ever more integrated, honest, authentic, whole, and useful. Now you can "practice" for practice's sake. It's like you've finally got the mass of debris out of the way, and now you can have a life. There's stuff to deal with, but now you know how, you have the tools, the insight. You can actually understand the books and the teachings, read them and say "yeah, I see" instead of "sounds great but what does it mean?"

Thoughts?

Ona Kiser wrote: So when people say "nondual awareness" is ongoing, my understanding is that they mean the knowledge, the recognition is there. Not that they are in a state similar to what one experiences during a big shift, where one might have big immersive wowza moment, and that they just stay there in that state ongoing.

If someone's experience is other than this, please feel free to share!!

Okay I see what you're getting at. My experience has been very much like this but not identical of course. What I was alluding to above was having had non-dual experiences since my last big shift - if I contemplate the nature of consciousness and pay attention to that aspect of perception which divides (dropping it), the subject/background begin to merge and sometimes there's a moment of nonduality - realized that is, keeping in mind what Jake was pointing out.

It is not associated with any kind of path moment, and it's happened a number of times since 4th. Incidentally, for me, 4th path was the only path where non-dual realization appeared in full force and it lasted far longer than a moment. Otherwise I experienced it only once prior to that - a year before SE and it really got my attention but my teacher at the time smacked me down for reporting it!

Jake, I read that Adyashanti book a few months ago and thought it was helpful. Maybe I should take another look at it...

Ona Kiser wrote: @Jake, I do think there's something to be said for "being done" actually being the beginning of something productive and useful. You've gotten all the bullshit out of the way, and now you can move forward with a life that is ever more integrated, honest, authentic, whole, and useful. Now you can "practice" for practice's sake. It's like you've finally got the mass of debris out of the way, and now you can have a life. There's stuff to deal with, but now you know how, you have the tools, the insight. You can actually understand the books and the teachings, read them and say "yeah, I see" instead of "sounds great but what does it mean?"

Thoughts?

Yeah Ona, that's pretty much how I see it. I was hanging out with a friend a few weeks back and we were talking about this. The analogy of the apprentice--journeyman--master came to mind. Shifting from seeker mode to finder mode (awakening) is like transitioning from apprentice to journeyman. You've got the basic skills. You are ready to start applying it creatively in your own way, out from under the watchful eye of any particular authority-- though as you're passing through various towns and valleys, you are capable of really learning a lot from different masters; still, you are kind of on your own. The 'practice' is about application in life. You can even offer some coaching to beginners you may encounter, even though you aren't a master yet. It's a sense of independence, sure footed exploration, open ended development. The basis is certain ... and... the path is open. Learning unfolds. Something like that lol!

I do totally loathe having to admit this, but my experience is more along the lines of what Jed McKenna describes, which is why I have a love/hate relationship with those books. I think, Ona, that you and I are using the term "emptiness" in different ways. I remember my path fruitions, but that's not what I mean by the emptiness of all phenomena. I mean that I experienced phenomena without me being there as a reference point. So they are empty of meaning, because the meaning-giver (me) has left the scene. There is also, sad to say, no love or wonder connected with it. In my every day manifestation I experience awe and wonder, I cry, I feel compassion, but it's not the same thing as this other business, whatever it is. There is peace, there is rest, there is a feeling that I am gone. The closest description I can give is that it's like experiencing the world after my death. There's nothing personal about any of it.

I don't mean I can't love; love can arise spontaneously, as it did one time when I saw my child and there was a movement of feeling so pure that there was no thought connected with it. There was a certain freedom in the way I let all phenomena manifest within and around and through me. Anyway, you're right about one thing: this is a confusing discussion.

Edit: The reason there's no wonder connected with the experience is because wonder would imply me having a judgment as an observer, only I can't do that because I'm gone. But I suppose I could call the experience itself one of pure wonder, with no one doing the wondering. But in an odd way it's quite anticlimactic.

Mike Ramos wrote: Jake, I read that Adyashanti book a few months ago and thought it was helpful. Maybe I should take another look at it...

Yeah, I actually haven't read it yet! Just the headings. My girlfriend and I just participated in a study group. It was based on that teaching and had weekly podcasts and then we got together with some friends and sat and chatted. The talks covered the topics of the book. Incidentally, our friends have been students and friends of Adya's for a long time, and have spent a lot of personal informal time with him, and it was interesting to pick their brains a bit. He sounds like a wicked down to earth, nice, ordinary guy. Like, super ordinary. Very reassuring!