(Part 3) Top products from r/awakened

Cool man - I hope you find what you're looking for.

About 20 years ago, I came across a former monk and was turned onto his book called Dance of a Fallen Monk. He spent 21 years in a monastery and this book talks all about his journey into the monastery and how his life unfolded along the way. It's still in the top 5 of my all time favorite books.

> This learning and growing after a point cannot occur over the internet or from books, but only from being in the direct presence of a master.

That is one way to look at it. However there are many masters that did not have masters before them.

I don't claim to be any sort of scholar on the subject but The Buddha apparently didn't have a master and simply sat under the Bodhi Tree and gained enlightenment....Ok I'm sure he did more than sit there but the point is, no master taught him. Same with others.

If we truly have the spark of the divine within, there are no doors that are inaccessible to us.

I've recently been learning about Dimensional Jumping and it's really helping to expand my ideas of what is possible. If you're interested, I recently found this guy to be quite compelling - here's a vid of his that I think really helps explain the concepts.

There's also a subreddit that discusses this stuff called /r/DiminsionalJumping.

Fun stuff

> I'm talking about why the awareness that I experience is experiencing sensory inputs from the point of view of this body-abstraction instead of any other body-abstraction in existence.

Ohhh. That's a very big question. Years ago I went out to explore this, so I ended up writing a program that analyzes visual information. I ended up throwing the stock market at it.

From this I have an idea how the underlining processes work, but they're only a guess -- the way I re-engineered them onto a computer, but from modeling my own awareness machine. If you want the finer underlining details, I can explain, but I think it is a bit of a rabbit hole for what you're probably looking for.

Then from there, at a higher level falls into the abstraction bit. So like, if you see a pattern a bunch of times (a bunch of similar patterns) the mind will "compress" this pattern into a single concept and from that concept into a single word, or a set of words. This makes all the things we know of in the universe.

Of course, I'm using language to describe language here, and that gets a little twisty (loopy particularly), but one thing at a time. No need to get overloaded.

You might like the book GEB or it's easier cousin I Am A Strange Loop.

>If multiple points of experience exist, then you have not answered what separates them. You have instead linked to something incoherent about abstractions, which is all anyone ever does when asked this question.

You can get into perceptions. The book Prometheus Rising does a great job diving into that and is a fun read too.

But are you talking about perceptions, which is interpretations of patterns, or multiple instances of awareness? Like how one eye is different from the other?

A simpler answer, which might be what you're looking for, is the mind machine has a process that identifies difference. This has to have memory to do so, most likely in time, but theoretically it only needs a single frame of space to do so.

Do you like fantasy stories? The Gita is actually just one chapter in India's greatest epic, the Mahabharata. It's an amazing story, and gives a great cultural background for Hinduism. Hindu's other epic, the Ramayana, is also lauded by many. I actually just began reading it recently.

Hindu's purest (and probably the world's longest) treatise on non-duality is the book at the very top of the bookshelf, Vasistha's Yoga. It's intense, so if you are just beginning, it's probably not the best intro to Hindu thought.

The most ancient written roots of pure Hinduism are found in the Upanishads. Eknath Eswaran's introduction and commentary are sublime.

A more modern, yet just as mystical take on Hinduism is The Autobiography of a Yogi.

You know what? I'm sure everyone's going to share any of the actual books on awakening or enlightenment or whatever (although I don't see The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts listed yet, and that was instrumental for getting the ball rolling for me before I even knew there was a ball to roll - I still pick it up every now and again and read passages).

But anyway, in my early 20's, I was REALLY into Tom Robbins, and I realize now that those books connected me with a truth I didn't yet know how to find. He's a freakin' genius. His words still, to this day, make me giddy.

So if you're ever interested in wild, hilarious, raucous fiction that gropes the awakened viewpoint like a drunk in a whorehouse, I recommend these books:

Skinny Legs and All

Jitterbug Perfume

Still Life With Woodpecker

He has more, and they're all equally is good in many ways - those three just happen to be my favorite.

Yes its a wonderful thing. Most probably will no believe unless they experience it themselves. (And that's the point, heh!)

I found so far while in lucidity its mostly useful for sensory perceptual changes. DMT now has almost no effect anymore, but damn what a powerful tool on the journey. I do enjoy from a little self perspective the perceptual changes of micro dosing.

On heavy flow days, I will notice the self referencing pattern overlays and fractals. I remember asking my inner being when it pipes in, what they are? All I got was "the brain filters this out normaly" ... a thanks LIFE for being cryptic as usual, lol.

The explorer me would like to study these more, later after some research the I found a guy "Jason Padgett" who suffered a brain injury and his brain rewired itself to perceive what is normal under the hood. He see's the world as geometric, fractal, faceted, time shifts like matrix layers and sees numbers as shapes. How amazing would that be?

Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel

>But what about the oxitocine bond between child and mother?
The chemistry of maternal love is real. So is the feeling. And when the chemistry ceases the withdrawal syndromes are all too obvious.

Yes, I've read something that speaks to this poetically alongside physiological detail, in regards to the limbic brain also A General Theory of Love. But this is a specific kind of relational love.

>NO - the feeling of abandonment is precisely result of our experience, it is the very core of our natural identity.

Yet that is what he is meaning I believe, while proposing from and stating there is a condition beyond this. Have you read his work? It is perhaps being operatively aware in this 'beyond' condition that the activity of contraction as he calls it is perceived to be hallucinatory, state/stage conditional.

> That is why depression is the only truly effective state of individuation, the state of detachment from all cultural categories, the state of entirely submerging in the river of pure sorrow, where we can enter only alone, and from which we emerge as true individuals.

It is a necessary state and position-as-perspective to enter, I would agree. But there is more and/or other (transpersonal developments).

Just read this book and you will wake up real quick:

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-God-Uncommon-Dialogue-Book/dp/0399142789/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462754475&sr=8-1&keywords=conversations+with+god

There are 7-8 books that follow it and it covers every aspect of life. I wouldn't know how to answer your question because there are so many different aspects of life but in a nutshell, my life seriously improved. I spoke to others that read these books and all of them say the same thing. It's an exciting roller coaster ride all the way through and at the end you should be a brand new person but a whole lot more powerful.

There is a great book by Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann called Persuasions of the Witch's Craft that looks into this very question.

Why are some people, especially reasonable/educated people, drawn to these types of beliefs? She pretty much dives right in and practices the techniques herself and ingratiates herself in the culture, fantastic read.

Jung worked with his shadow using a process called Active Imagination. It can be difficult to find legit information online about it, so I’d recommend reading this book: Jung on Active Imagination .

Essentially, he actively pursued imagined conversations with a personified version of his shadow. This helped him both understand and integrate the parts of him that were devious and ignored. Of course, I’m simplifying a very complex process, but if you’re really interested in pursuing shadow work, I would recommend checking out this process.

Gently? Not sure, but try The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest. Read the Amazon preview.

All translations and commentaries are done from the perspective of the person doing the translation.

One person's best translation is another's worst because of that issue as different spiritual perspectives are sometimes completely opposed to each other.

I'm a fan of Maharishi Mahesh YOgi's Translation and Commentary of the first 6 chapters of the Gita.

Most people hate it because he speaks from the perspective of someone who teaches that TM is the most effective way to become enlgihtened and, while he never made it clear, most meditation practices actually take you in the opposite direction from TM.

His students, Thomas Egenes and Vernon Katz have published translations of the Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras that are based on enlightenment from a TM perspective, and those too will be seen as the worst possible from the perspective of those who promote mindfulness.

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Example:

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Taught by an inferior man this Self cannot be easily known,

even though reflected upon. Unless taught by one

who knows him as none other than his own Self,

there is no way to him, for he is subtler than subtle,

beyond the range of reasoning.



Not by logic can this realization be won. Only when taught

by another, [an enlightened teacher], is it easily known,

dearest friend.

-Katha Upanishad, I.2.8-9

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That [unmanifest] is full; This [manifest] is full.


From fullness fullness comes out.

Taking fullness, from fullness,

what remains is fullness.

-Isha Upanishad (Translation Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)


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https://www.amazon.com/Upanishads-Translation-Tarcher-Cornerstone-Editions/dp/0399174230

https://www.amazon.com/Maharishi-Mahesh-Yogi-Bhagavad-Gita-Translation/dp/0140192476/ref=la_B000AQ4QWC_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526704395&sr=1-1

It's an excerpt from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.

The entire book is a transcript taken from a series of video interviews with Joseph Campbell. The series is called The Power of Myth and it's still available on NETFLIX, I believe. I've watched the entire series and am currently reading the book and it's given me a profound understanding.

According to the Buddhist view of the mind, there are amotions that are inherently destructive; they are usually summarized with the so-called "three poisons": greed, anger, ignorance. Connected to them there are others, like jealousy, pride etc.
There is an interesting book about the negative emotions, it compares the modern scientific view of emotions and the traditional Buddhist one, it originates from one of the yearly meetings that the Dalai Lama holds with scientists about different subjects.

Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.