Enlightenment: Practical steps

[Charlie Pecos]

All are one, there is no separation. Being separate is only an illusion. Upon experiencing this, kindness and compassion for other selves flows freely. What a beautiful future we have in store for all of us!

Many thanks and much love to you Sepia, for your wonderful teachings.

[Elly]

Thank you Sepia for sharing your knowledge and experience. Your words have been like a companion to me.

[Whiskey_Mystic]

This thread is one of the greater contributions to the Avalon community and I hope I see more like it in the future.

[sepia]

---

Time to bump this thread...

My teaching is almost complete.
Many things cannot be expressed in words and for many things a public Forum is not the right place...

But if you have questions feel free to ask.

...and be sure the spiritual presence is always there to be contacted telepathically for spiritual support.

With best wishes,

Sepia

[music]

Posted by sepia (here)


If the instinctive levels (first, second, third Chakra) feeling-aspect (fourth Chakra) are integrated, we can be at our best in the third eye.

I studied kundalini for many years under a gifted man. In fact, I thought I had been studying it for 6 months when he arrived one morning and announced "OK, you are now ready for the yoga of kundalini". Interestingly, I was never given any answers, nor told whether my experiences or findings were "right" or "wrong", yet having been recommended this thread (thank you meeradas), in this, the first random post I have read, I find similarities in what I have just posted today here

It's short, so I'll put it here

"Within the body, our heart is the place where we can most aid our ascension process. The first 3 chakras can be seen as analogous to the first 3 dimensions. The physical - structure - a house. The next dimension corresponds to the heart, and here our house becomes a home through the action of Love. The higher chakras reflect the outer, starting with the throat - the voice - the word - intention outwards - creation. The higher bodily chakras (and beyond) are analogous to the higher dimensions. So the physical realm below, and the spiritual, higher dimensional world above meet in the heart, which is also the seat of time in our body. The heart counts down our sojourn in the earthly plane, and time takes us on to the moment of our ascension.

The heart and time are a meeting point between the lower and the higher dimensions, and the key to maximum functionality in the heart is Love. Feel Love, give Love, be Love."

Posted by NancyV (here)
As much as I enjoy different masters and gurus I believe that those who state you must have a guru or master (or Jesus) in order to be saved or to evolve spiritually are promoting disempowerment

I use the term "guru" to denote the learning experience, which resides within source, and is synonymous with "wonder" or "wonderous". The master and pupil participate as equals within wonder.

Love

[VaughnB]

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” [ Teihard de Chardin ]

[another bob]

Here is an excerpt from a talk given by Tenzin Palmo (Jetsunma since 2008), subject of Vicki Mackenzie’s book Cave in the Snow, which tells Ven. Palmo’s life story and of her twelve years in solitary retreat:

Westerner’s come to the Dharma with minds that are already chock-full, mostly with garbage, and when we try to plant our little seeds of the Dharma on top of that, they will have trouble surviving. It makes more sense to start by clearing it out. In other words, if you’ve got a house full of junk that’s never been cleaned, and you bring all your fancy thangkas and Buddha images with brocades and you try to hang them over all the junk, it’s only going to look like even more of a junk pile. The first thing we need is a house cleaning – we need to clean and scour. . .

One of the main practices in Buddhism is the six paramitas, the six perfections.

GENEROSITY: Giving is generosity – not just things, but your time, your attention, giving yourself. No matter how stupid we are, however deluded or angry, however we are caught up, we can still be generous. It’s not just giving things we don’t like anyway, but giving things we like, because we like them. Giving is very important.

ETHICS: Ethics are based on non-harming: not killing, not lying, not stealing, not taking intoxicants, which confuse the mind, and no sexual misconduct. Without this idea of not causing harm to ourselves and others we have no foundation for Dharma in our lives.

PATIENCE: When you’re in solitary retreat, who’s there to be patient with? People who cause us harm, who really push our buttons, they are our true Dharma friends. It’s true! When people push our buttons, then we see that we have buttons. Difficult situations, difficult persons, really are the sandpaper which makes us smooth. Then we can look into our minds. The problem isn’t out there. It’s in here.

Those Tibetan monks and nuns who spent so many years in Chinese prisons, although some of them were traumatized, many of them came out looking like they’d been in retreat and had heart-felt gratitude to their practice and their tormentors for keeping them on the Dharma path. Their patience was no longer theoretical.

EFFORT: All of this takes effort. When we first come across the Dharma we think, “Oh, it’s so obvious, why didn’t I think of that before?” It’s no great, secret wisdom, but we don’t do it. It’s one thing to think about it, to know it intellectually, and another thing to experience. To really have it as part of oneself, as natural as one’s breathing, requires perseverance. Perseverance and patience are the two most important components.

MEDITATION: It’s important to have time where one just can just go inward. I honestly recommend that apart from whatever practice you are doing, as part of your commitment, for those of you who have commitments, you also spend at least 20 minutes a day doing shamata, calm-abiding meditation, because it is very important to have an inner stillness. Within us we do have this center which is like a quiet pool. But usually we are unable to contact it. Meditation is a way of coming into contact with our inner center.

WISDOM: Wisdom is a mind that does not cling. Our mind clings continually, to people, to objects, to memories, to opinions, to our identity, to who we think we are. Somebody said to me that the vision he got in his mind was of being cover all over with tiny little barbs, or little hooks, and as we swirl around everything catches on the hooks, so we carry it all with us. The secret therefore is to withdraw all the hooks. We’re touching all these things, but they all slide off, nothing holds on to us. You see, the problem is not the objects. This is what the Buddha said over and over again. It’s not the things or the people that are the problem. It’s our attachment. It’s our attachment that causes fear.

Renunciation is not so much a matter of giving things up on the outside, although that can be very helpful. But the real renunciation is inner renunciation: to be naked in the moment. We clothe ourselves continually with our memories and idea of “I am female, I am male, I’m a teacher, I’m a doctor, I’m a bus driver, I’m a monk, I’m a lay person, I’m married, I’m not married, I’m a good person, I’m a bad person.”

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHETHER YOU’RE A GOOD PERSON OR A BAD PERSON. The whole question is – who is this I? It’s like a tree gradually losing its leaves – slowly, slowly. That’s what real meditation is all about. In the Buddha Dharma, again and again they talk about seeing things as they really are. And the Buddha talked about it so much because it’s almost impossible for us to see things clearly. We only see our own interpretation, our own version, our own projections.

In a way the whole of the Buddhist life is a matter of letting go, of these heavy burdens of memories, opinions, identities we carry around like heavy armor. But why carry armor around? We think it protects us but it keeps us away from other people who are also wearing armor. Can you imagine two knights in armor trying to embrace each other? This is what we’re doing all the time and then we wonder why our relationships don’t work. Then the Dharma becomes another form of armor. The Dharma should be a way of giving us the inner confidence to start shedding, to realize there is something else beyond this ego identity that is our true nature, and that it’s okay to drop all these other identifications.

In our practice we should have periods of time and even retreats when we give ourselves the space to really ask the question, who am I? One of the points of deity practice, of seeing yourself as the deity, is that it helps us to deal with the question of who we are. For instance, we’re sitting here thinking, “Now I am Chenrezig [the embodiment of the compassion of all the Buddhas, the Bodhisattva of Compassion]. I am white, glowing, I have four arms,” and so on and so forth. This is so important, but we don’t really believe this. It’s our fundamental delusion that we sit there thinking that really I am Mary Smith, pretending that I am Chenrezig – when of course the truth is that I am Chenrezig pretending to be Mary Smith.

I think in all our mediations, especially in visualizations, the important thing is to engage the heart, that it doesn’t just become mental excercise. So it’s very important if, for example, say on is doing prostrations, and one is visualizing the whole Refuge Tree with thousands and thousands of people and deitites and all these things. People go completely crazy trying to visualize all this and keep them all together. The really important thing is to get the conviction that even though you cannot see them, they are all there – absolute conviction that because of our ignorance, because of the veils of our impure perceptions, we cannot at this moment see all the Buddhas and bodhisattvas in front of us, but that they are there and they have always been there.

That’s the whole point of tantra – that we are making these false identifications the whole way through. That’s our delusion. And that’s why in tantra, if we’re doing it properly, not while we’re sitting for the short time doing our prayers, but all through the day we’re seeing all beings as Chenrezig. It’s not like we become megalomaniacal and say, “Oh, well, I’m Chenrezig and then there are all these poor little suckers.” All being are Chenrezig. We respect their innate Buddha nature. All sounds are Om mani padme hung. All thoughts – good thoughts, bad thoughts, stupid thoughts, wise thoughts – are they play of the dharmakaya, the wisdom of the Buddhas. If we can keep that going throughout our whole day, maybe something will happen. Do you understand? We have to do it. But we don’t do it rigidly, but with a mind that is very spacious and at the same time very focused and pure. And with a heart that is genuinely open. The transformation happens down in the heart, it doesn’t just happen in the head. It doesn’t matter how clever we are or how brilliant we are a giving Dharma talks, or how many books we’ve read or how much we’ve studied. That’s up here. What’s happening in our hearts? That’s all that counts in the end, when we die. What’s going to help us? How much we’ve got in our heads? That’s gone.

We have to take the Dharma and so totally merge it with our everyday lives that there’s no difference. We always say a prayer again and again, that my life and the Dharma may be equal, may be one. Everything we do, every action we take, every person we meet, every breath we take, if we are alert, if our minds are in that open spaciousness, that awareness, with that quality of knowing, then it would be perfect. The Buddha always talked about th Middle Way, between the extremes of making the strings of the instrument too tight so that they make a harsh sound, or making the strings too loose, so they don’t make any sound at all. We need to tune it just right, so that it makes a very sweet melody. Our life can be beautiful too, a beautiful melody, if we try.

[Vit Sirius]

The biggest step of "enlightenment" is your own healing. It is my personal experience which I shared in the following videos few days ago:

PART 1.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x207GVG6aQg

PART 2.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cZr5A3AwRCg

PART 3.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1D4WDLVy50

[Frogweaver]

Based on the teaching of Supreme Master Ching Hai; to be enlightened means that you gain the inner light and sound vibration; hence the term. Enlightened and Awakened mean the same thing; and knowing that all light is manifested consciousness, then you could understand it as such; when you learn to decode light patterns through your third eye and see all things as they are; consciousness. It is like reversing a process.. for most people feel that they are a product of this 'physical world'.. where as an enlightened person finally decodes what is before them, to be consciousness manifested as light, and they can truly connect with all things as they are not separate. Everyone is enlightened, but some lights are dimmer because of all the mess in the way. .