Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Questions from the spiritual path

How can I find the Self? (He owes me money.)

What color is Enlightenment? I hear it's a light shade of periwinkle.

Does Enlightenment improve your sex life? Will Enlightenment help with male pattern balding? Do Guru's drive Ferrari's? Come on - my current pick up lines aren't working!

Have you eaten your rice porridge yet? Have you washed your bowl, you freakin' slob?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around?

What's the deal with the Zen kid riding the damn Ox all the time? Doesn't he have homework to do or something?

Does being infinite make you look fat?

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, pay your damn utility bill.

"While doing an advanced yoga posture, I experience a deep darkness that seems to go on forever. Is this enlightenment?" - You're doing it wrong, that's your colon.

30 comments:

Mr. Smirthwaite said...

Does a dog have buddha nature? Yes, but the vet says a couple of these, two times a day and he'll be fine.

Lune said...

Trust your vibes and seek a higher vibration.....but check it is not the local radio station you are picking up.

Anonymous said...

i can see what your doing with mocking the spiritual path - i can understand why you do that. but to me to one who does not know the self it doesnt seem funny because this is all i have ever known. i was born and things were like this and they still are. and i do appreciate that i do feel separate and it doesnt make sense that i am identifeod with a dying body. yet it is all i have ever known. if the self is true - that means i have been born into torture. God surely is wicked then?

Anonymous said...

This is GREAT! Love it, Randall!

Mike

Scarfox said...

@ anonymous, But if it turns out that you are God, then what? what if it turns out as god you chose to trick yourself for a bit, maybe cause you got bored and wanted to become kinda aware of yourself, maybe god wanted to split into many so god could interact with itself and play games called life, as life.

t said...

i wonder how many 'people' must die in fear and ignorance in this masochistic 'game' before god tires of it? maybe never? maybe at the end of the kali yuga?

Anonymous said...

In your sleep you dream. Things happen in your dream, thoughts and feelings come and go. You believe you are in peril and then you are safe. You imagine something is controlling it all, something other and greater than you the dreamer. You call this something other god. In the morning you wake up and realize there was no one but you.

Jeffrey

Randall Friend said...

Anonymous,

It isn't mocking, my friend. Many many years experience with the spiritual path leads to compassion, not mocking. Levity can be a nice release of the constant struggling to understand.

When are you NOT knowing the Self? The Self is known in ALL experiences, already. It's just mixed up with the body-mind. The Self is the most intimate aspect of experience - it's how you know that you exist.

It is the idea that you were born which is the core concept. You were never born - your actual nature is the totality itself - this so-called "life" came upon you and you identified with it. Cease to identify with a limited existence, that's all enlightenment is about.

God is of your own creation - God is in charge of the workings of this Consciousness - you swallow up Consciousness each night and remain untouched. Therefore God should bow down to you!


love
randall

Lune said...

I have been on this path too, probably had every single thought that has been written in the post above. Liberation seems to be just the next book or yoga session away, (if we are good enough of course).

ALL OF IT IS TOTALLY OK. God is in all of this, the only thing the little 'I' misses is the fact that we can never grasp it, never hold GOD in our hands, so it continues to search. When the seeking stops God appears.

x x x

Anonymous said...

Ahhhh... & Ohhh & Hell Yes~!

Anonymous said...

I agree with you Randall that levity is needed at least for me as a counterbalance to what often seems so serious. This intense wanting things to be different i.e. to be awakened or enlightened is often so serious as if my life depended on it; my life being the finite entity I call me but cannot find anywhere. Often there is the nagging feeling that I have to become enlightened before I die and with that idea comes the sense of urgency and seriousness about it as if something painful is going to happen if I don't feel oneness before the body/mind dissolves. More mind stuff spinning fantasies. Tomorrow I will awake and think now there is one less day I have to become what I am not.

Jeffrey

t said...

i feel that too.

Randall Friend said...

Jeffrey,

There is no enlightenment waiting to be attained. The search for something better is a direct denial of this very moment, which is all there ever is. It's seeing this moment as a speed-bump on the way to enlightenment, and in that missing the very "state" or presence of which the word enlightenment points.

Totality is one without a second. You are that already. There is nothing to become, nothing to get. There is a belief in a "jeffrey" as some separate individual. All seeking relies on this false concept, all enlightenment "states" depend on a separate "self" to attain them.

You are the totality already - there is such thing as "jeffrey", no such thing as a separate individual.

"Finding enlightenment before I die" is completely missing the point. There is no death.

We can hold on tight to our beliefs about enlightenment and continue to suffer. Or we can lay them aside and look at what is being pointed out.

The only thing you really know is that you exist. All else is conceptual knowledge, overlooking the false images and concepts, names and forms, taking reality to be made up of separate "things". As long as that's the basis from which the search is conducted, there will always be frustration, as you're seeing.

That pure knowledge of existence is the most direct pointer - how do you know you exist? Consider nothing else. What is that "I AM"? How do you know "I AM"? What does that mean? Why is that existence so certain?

It is so certain because you are always HERE - that presence is always the very basis for all experience, no matter what the experience is, good or bad, right or wrong, nice or shitty.

Consider that presence - you ARE that presence - that is always here - it's blindingly obvious - it is the very basis for the entire world to arise, for that body-mind to be known as objective.

You are the source - it is your presence that is necessary before the world and all the seeking can appear.

Consider how you know "I AM".


love
randall

Lune said...

Dear Jeffry,

a deep trust in 'what is' has arisen in 'me' recently. Yes, it is extremely hard to see beyond the wanting 'something' to happen unless the I let's go of its control over its supposed life.

Look at places untouched by humans, by egos; wildernesses, forests, seascapes, and all the 'life' they contain. Everything exists in total harmony, balance, completely at one with the IS-ness of being. We are also part of this existence, needing no ego to call the shots, yet the ego is part of it too, and most of the time thinks it is in control.

It takes total honesty with one's situation sometimes to be able to 'drop' the I and let go; essentially letting a 'falling into the what-is-ness' happen. This what-is-ness is existing all around us and in us at every moment RIGHT NOW.

Total honesty to relinquish the power struggle.

x

Anonymous said...

"Finding enlightenment before I die" is completely missing the point. There is no death."

Surely this body/mind will die. Can you expalin some more Randall thank you. D.

No One In Particular said...

The what-is-ness includes the resistance to what-is-ness. It's what is, no matter what that seems to be. Simple. Utterly, completely simple. The greatest levity is that the entire appearance, everything we've apparently been struggling to do, all of civilisation, legislated compassion, better health care, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, fighting corruption, seeing conspiracy amongst the small minority with great power and wealth, trying to be oh so very good, oh so very spiritual, is just that - appearance, completely meaningless, and completely wonderful, and simply complete. Here "we" are. This is it.

Randall Friend said...

Anonymous,

The body-mind will die. Yes.

But you are not the body-mind. The body-mind is a form, an appearance, a manifestation of some essence, like the ring is a manifestation of gold. The ring can be melted down, changed into a chain, a pin, but it never loses it's essence as gold.

The body-mind is an appearance - only a changing form. What you are is not that form, not some temporary entity abiding within that form, not a separate person born and on the way to death.

You are the essence itself, the very Being of all names and forms. You are the totality - Life - whatever name you want to use. And that essence is manifesting as what IS, right this very moment.

You are not the ring, searching for gold. You are the gold, realizing it is not-ring.


love
randall

Anonymous said...

I know finding enlightenment before I die is missing the point. The comment was more about the kind of repeating desires and fears that circulates as a mental habit. I both understand and enjoy the many analogies such as the gold and the ring which point to what cannot be expressed in words. But I have to say that after forty years of reading books, listened to people, doing practices what is being pointed at is still just an idea to me.

I read what people say and I make ideas about what I hear. What I hear makes sense but it’s like hearing someone give a lecture about France if you’ve never been there. Hearing about France is not the same as going to France. It sounds like a nice place, I believe it is there and I would like to go there but when you ask how to get to get there no one can tell you bow, only that it can happen. I get the idea that there is no you and no there to get to but it all does get frustrating.

Jeffrey

tom said...

Hi,

I once sat in a cave during 9 months after reading 'Talks' by Ramana,in sitting-asana up to my bollocks in beetles and bat shit. And Oh boy did I see colors at the end. I took another 6 months to heal those festering wounds, I tell you ! Now, in my reclining years I have come to know the true colour of parabrahman. Ask yourself : "What's the color of I AM?" ...
Yep, you got it too !

Anonymous said...

will time and space come to an end? what will be the experience then?

Anonymous said...

It says "Choose an identity" to make a comment on here. That did me in.
I have nothing to say now. Ziltch.
I guess I will just be 'a non i mouse'. But then you wont know who I am. That makes two of us - which is duality. Ah, now we are getting somewhere. Where? Oh. Here. But I was here already. Where has the 'getting somewhere' gone?
Who is running this blog?
Where is it running to?
This is silly, how do I get out of here? This is virtually reality.
Ah....I hear the sound of one duck farting.....
- Gilbert A Non I Mouse.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous (Gilbert) - thank you!

Randall,

I'd been talking to a friend who recommended Salvia. Ive never done it but from years past i remember, while on some other stuff, that even if people say a 'trip' lasts 2 minutes or 3 hours, when in that experiential state, you are effectively suspended in infinity. There is no Time there.

Anyways, I had this in mind while going to sleep and while sleeping, I suddenly became aware of myself sleeping - and of the complete absence of time. There was what i would call a 'nice high' feeling (i am not on any drugs) and a buzzing in my head, felt like what i would call a kundalini experience. When in that state, the thought popped up "this is still an experience, who is having it?" I dont think I got an answer, i couldn't follow it through to the end.

anyways in short, it became very clear that when you 'sleep' then there is no guarantee where you will awake into - or if. Its amazing how that is taken for granted. This realization has completely and utterly demolished any remaining notions of suicide as an escape from here and now. BTW im not suicidal but the intellectual curiosity was there - whether out-ing oneself will end this dream/suffering or not.

thanks
Shiva

Anonymous said...

What we call 'death' is actually loss - so called 'others' dying. They disappear from this experience never to show up again and we assume that we too will disappear never to return.

But WHO will *I* disappear TO? Disappearance/death requires two, one that disappears and one who notices the disappearance. I can never disappear to myself - its a paradox, and beyond this point, my mind cannot resolve this to satisfactory conclusion (and believe me I have tried).

to experience my own death, I have to be there. it makes no sense!

Shiva

Anonymous said...

"to experience my own death, I have to be there. it makes no sense!"

There is no "i" to begin with, end of story. Dave.

tom said...

The experience-ING of Dy-ING ...
Now, THAT's LIVING !!!

Anonymous said...

what a load of. life is just torture and there is point to doin anything. and i bitterly resent being born to suffer and to wathc others suffer. i fucking hate this shit

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Anonymous said...

"i bitterly resent being born to suffer and to wathc others suffer. i fucking hate this shit"

This is so familiar feeling for this "me" too. Bob writes what's wrong with right now unless you think about it. I have found that helpful when reminded, it will pass mate.

Anonymous said...

WHO resents being born?
WHO was born?
WHO is watching the 'others' suffering?
WHO are the 'others suffering'?
WHO fucking hates this shit?

Anonymous said...

Yes i get all the who argument.

But even though I can see that - nothing happens. Nothing changes.

Anonymous said...

"But even though I can see that - nothing happens. Nothing changes."

Perhaps you are the no-thing that does not change and does not happen, the changeless background, the seeing/knowing.