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Showing posts from August, 2006

One Million Awake as a MEME

More and more One Million Awake is clarifying in my mind, which believe me, with this mind is no easy task. The real and primary aspect behind One Million Awake is to spread the Enlightened Humanity meme.... So you may ask... What is a meme? Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life. Isn't memetics just a fancy name for _________ (fill in the blank with "cultural evolution", "behavioral psychology", "sociobiology", or anything else)? Why is this anything new? The breakthrough in memetics is in extending Darwinian evolution to culture. There are several exciting conclusions from doing that, one of which is the ability to predict that ideas will spread not because they are "good ideas", but because they contain "good memes" such as danger, food and sex that push our evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention to them. Every tim...

More Questions on Enlightenment and Claiming Enlightenment

Dear Jason, Thank you for your kind letter, and I'll see if I can't respond to some of your points. Some of this may be rather spontaneous, so hopefully if you consider it carefully, it will make some sense or cause some recognition: Q. Teaching the XXXXXXX  Course, one of the first things that happens is people realize they maybe aren’t as enlightened as they think they are.  A. 1. Perhaps they ARE as enlightened as they think they are, but also NOT as enlightened as they think they are. For most people (spiritually oriented people) there are two distinct realities - the noumenal and phenomenal, i.e. the absolute and relative planes. (By nature, I must answer according to the Recognition that is afforded me, so if some of this doesn't make sense, play with it.)  The process of Waking up or Enlightenment is several layered: 1st - one must let go of the old identifications...I am this idea, this belief, this perception...all the way down to I am this body, I am thi...

The TRUTH about Enlightenment

This is a topic which we will probably discuss endlessly, so let's start here: There is no absolute definition about enlightenment. Now, if you just believed that, you just believed an absolute definition of enlightenment. See how tricky the whole thing is? However, that being the case, there still are some things that can be discussed. "One who says they are enlightened can't be enlightened." Is this true? Then how come there are so many recognized teachers of enlightenment who are either directly saying that they are or speaking from the platform of being enlightened? Why is there so much literature and scriptures on the nature of enlightenment if nothing can be said about it. Lao Tzu starts the Tao Te Ching with the words, "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao" and then proceeds to speak hundreds of words about that which is evidently NOT the Tao, since he is speaking of it. Why would he be speaking of it, if not subtly suggesting that he knows it...

How to Make 1,000,000 Dots Very Quickly

We have been moving along at a nice, slow clip, so to speak, up past 40 people who have now signed on as awake or committed to awakening. Now it occurred to me, that this could move much faster, especially since, I'll have to live to be over 2,000 years old at the present rate to reach the designated 1,000,000 awake. It occurred to me also, that this could move exponentially as well. On the website, there is a link to 1,000,000 dots. This was originally conceived of as a kind of joke, but I did it anyway. As a word doc, it took up 68 pages (so you don't need to open it if you don't have to...take my word for it). But I didn't sit there and hit the 'period' key1,000,000 times. I actually made 50 colons (each being 2 dots). I copied that and pasted it 10 times. That gave me 1,000 dots. I copied and pasted that 10 times, that gave me 10,000 dots. Copy and paste 10 times - 100,000 dots; copy and paste 10 times to 1,000,000. So, what if 10 people got 10 people to com...

Knowing

One of the predicaments which many (probably most) come across in the process of Awakening, is the difficulty of "who" wants to wake up. The impetus behind waking up comes directly from the ego wanting to end suffering. But the ego can't end suffering because it IS suffering. It is essentially the identification with the ego/thoughts that cause all suffering and in fact, bondage. The Ashtavakra says "Where there is an I there is bondage, and where there is no I, there is freedom." In Sanskrit, there is a grammatical noun called an agential noun. It is the adding of the suffix 'tr' to a verbal root. Thus, drastr is a seer; kartr is a doer, and conceivably jnatr is a knower, i.e. one who knows. However, when speaking of an actual knower of the Truth, they don't use the term jnatr, knower, but rather jnani, which could conceivably be translated as one who IS knowledge. So wisdom or enlightenment is not KNOWING, but rather NOT knowing. It is freedom from...

Freedom FROM and Freedom FOR

Awakening is about Freedom. Many of the terms that are synonymous with Awakening mean Freedom:  Liberation, Mukti and Moksha (both of which are Sanskrit terms for freed), Nirvana (literally extinguished or blown out), etc.  And what are you freed from? Everything. It is freedom most of all from the limiting believes and perceptions of limitations that are binding you, most rudimentary of which is the belief that there IS a YOU.  This can be most difficult (obviously) to let go of. We recently received a wonderful offering from Michael: What Is That I Am?   The fact that I can see objects means that I stand apart from them. I am not the objects I see.   The fact that I can see my thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and experiences means that I stand apart from them. I am not the thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and experiences I see.   The fact that I see the “I” that sees objects, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and experien...