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8th October 2014 01:45
Link to Post #1801
Avalon Member
Re: The Higher Self and transcendent experience, including OBEs
Interesting. chocolate doesn't want to discuss It, and Stan apparently says it's impossible, or at best misleading, to discuss It or describe It, beyond saying things like: "It can't be labelled." By the way, I've definitely been to that place too. Because Stan started this off by asking for comments, I'm presuming to take the liberty to offer my own further comments anyway.
Firstly, I've been visited by many dead individuals within one day, our time, of their death. All of them had gone through experiencing that stripping away or seeming dissolution virtually into nothing -- which I would actually call true detachment and letting go --, and true dropping of one's identities. I believe that certainly Stan, and at least to a great degree chocolate, has "let go" much, much more fully than most individuals do immediately following their physical death. Yes, there is a real "stripping away" of all that you thought you were, like the ground continually being mowed away beneath your feet. And that process lasts for up to three days our time. But as I say, after physical death most individuals are feeling just great before the first day of it is over -- even though it does include the experience that it seems one is almost completely being rubbed out -- and yet that's fine, somehow.
In this thread I've mentioned how a (I think) very small percentage of individuals go through this process and still somehow manage to cling to most of their emotional body (i.e. their astral body) and keep hold of it until their next reincarnation -- which is usually disastrous but I guess they'll eventually learn not to do that. Similarly, many individuals manage to somehow retain much of their "personality", i.e. their mental body, even though it certainly feels initially as though one has been virtually rubbed out.
The first time I experienced It was just after I turned sixteen. Having gome through psychological death and the ego's utter horror (at being partly dissolved by that experience!), guess what I experienced? I found, with greater certainty and vividness than anything I'd ever experienced before, that the Nothing was actually Everything. And that Everything was amazingly intelligent and alive and so on, and it was ever so blissful just to look at/be the Everything. And what's more, the true I was It. I was Everything. From that time on, I always experience the great Nothing as either great peace (that passes understanding), or as something that brings bliss. Usually both.
Later, when I was sixteen, I would have experiences of what is known as nirvana. Let me explain that nirvana is actually the second lowest level of enlightenment. Whenever one is in that state, the thing that keeps grabbing one's attention is that all names are just totally inadequate labels, that words are so inadequate, that reality can't be grasped through any act of grasping such as the (attempted) use of names, for anything. Hmm, sounds a bit like what Stan is saying -- except that for me, this state is always blissful, in spite of always being full of a kind of randomness and openness that seems "crazy".
So, as I've conceded already, words are rather feeble and limited things in the face of the reality you've been mentioning, Stan. However, as we currently are, we aren't living in that total and utter Oneness, or in The-Unknowable-Beyond-All-Names. And the physical world we are actually living in certainly is a world that demands that we quite frequently must use words (or concepts, or pictures or signs or symbols). (I'll have to write another post soon that goes into this in much more detail.)
Because of this fact, for me (when I'm not immersed in a nirvana or similar state etc) there is great value in pointing towards the Unknowable through words, etc, because the more fully we can begin to connect to That in the everyday activities of our life, or to its slightest shadow or its fragrance, the freer we will be of suffering and so on. If you like, you can take the Zen Oxherding Pictures. Picture Eight is about achieving the experience/being of That. But this is only stage eight, it's not the ultimate, not while we're in this or any other lesser world. Pictures Nine and Ten refer to stages beyond, and superior to, just resting in That.
I might also mention that words point to meanings, and the meanings they point to continue to exist far beyond the conceptual level and in essence exist even, I would argue, at the Unknowability level.
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animovado (8th October 2014), aranuk (8th October 2014), chocolate (8th October 2014), Ikarusion (9th April 2015), Joe Akulis (20th October 2014), leavesoftrees (8th October 2014), Mark (9th November 2014), thunder24 (8th October 2014), Wind (8th October 2014)
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8th October 2014 12:39
Link to Post #1802