Who is Stirring the Mud?

If you truly want to Awaken, as the Buddha and others have over the centuries, then stop quoting the 'patriarchs' and actually work on dissolving the Ego and thereby losing ALL attachments.

This includes losing attachments to 'scriptures' of any kind. All so-called scriptures have been modified , added to and subtracted from by men who could not understand the original message of their founders.

If  you are a Buddhist and sit around arguing over quotes from those long dead, you are wasting your 'precious human life'.

Someone recently suggested that 'Oneness' was not all there was and how would I feel if he dropped a rock on my foot, along with other ridiculous suggestions followed by a Cha'an quotation.

If you dropped a rock on my unit's foot, pain would arise, but it would not be MY pain. Everything is an arising. Thoughts, feelings, sensations of all kinds are simply arisings.

You are NOT an Ego trapped inside a bag of skin.

Stop. Just stop the seemingly incessant 'thoughts'.

Cease to identify with the bag of skin, with the 'mind', with the personality, with pleasure or with pain.

There is no 'do-er'. You are doing nothing.

Essentially, 'you' are a just walking sensory organ.

Once you truly awaken, re-read some of those quotes and you will be able to tell which were written by those who had experienced the IS and those which were not. There really is a lot of crap out there.

Don't quote rubbish you don't even understand - Sit! Find the Silence. Find out WHAT it is that is looking, hearing and sensing...

Who Cares About One-ness?

So at its most basic level, what exactly is Enlightenment?

You will find that a lot of teachers of enlightenment insist on it encompassing more than the basic experience. There are plenty who insist that unless one has a huge, immediate awakening to the oneness of everything then one is not enlightened. Fortunately, that is an opinion.

Opinions are the realm of the ego. It could also be considered to be a belief and once again that is the realm of the ego. So, if these highly enlightened teachers are holding opinions and beliefs about what constitutes full enlightenment, should we care?

As far as I can see, the origins of the ideas of enlightenment date back thousands of years and the one with which most people are familiar is that of the Buddha (who Did Not Want to start a religion!).

Buddha gave a teaching called The Four Noble Truths which, when taken on their own, teach us that suffering is caused by attachment to (desire for) things of the world and that freedom from suffering is achieved by no longer being attached to those things. (Yes, I am deliberately simplifying it.)

So, if someone becomes free from egoic suffering, they must be Enlightened.

I don't see any mention in there of coming to realise that everything in the universe is just one thing, or "not two" as the main adherents of these views name it (Advaita).

(Eventually, every Enlightened Being will come to realise that everything is just one thing because everything is arising within Aware, therefore everything is Aware, but don't worry about that if it means nothing to you right now. Really. Don't! Let it come on it's own.)

In order to be enlightened you simply have to cease suffering. 

Suffering is caused by attachment to external things by the ego ("little me"). By coming to the realisation that the ego does not exist and is simply a series of thought patterns that arise and fall within the mind, one breaks free of its desires. 

Once one realises that one is actually not the ego, not the body, not the mind, not the personality and so forth, then all that is left is the Awakeness, the Aware. It doesn't matter if you are experiencing this as 'The Witness', 'The Vastness' or 'The One-ness'.

At that moment, suffering through attachments and desires ceases. One is 'Enlightened'.

The part of the mind that worries about understanding One-ness, Advaita, Non-Duality is the ego. The ego will latch onto those ideas and try to make you suffer by questioning whether you really are enlightened. This is just another way for the ego to try to regain control.

You do not need to understand it, because only the "little me", the ego, needs to understand things. 

You Are Awakeness. 

Awakeness knows its own true nature and does not think about it, because it exists before thought.

If you know who you are, Awakeness, but you don't know what you are – everything is fine, just relax and enjoy the Freedom from Suffering.

Watching the Mud Settle

There is no easy way to say this other than to come straight out with it.

I am awake.

Apparently, those were the words that Buddha uttered when a man on the road asked him what he was. I have been told that the word 'Buddha' actually means one who is awake. I guess that makes me a Buddha. (Laughing here)

I would like to point out here and now that the uses of the words like I, me and mine can cause all kinds of problems in the awakened state, but language is its own limitation. I will try to differentiate between the awakened view and the ego view where I feel it is necessary, but on the whole such writing can become very clumsy.

I woke up from the dream state on 1 April 2016. The people over at the website called 'Liberation Unleashed' refer to Awakening, or Liberation, as the 'cosmic joke'.[1] It seems appropriate that it happened for me on the date that it did.

The whole reason I am writing this is to also try to address the post-liberation state, not to become yet another unit that is solely dedicated to teaching the process of becoming enlightened, but that may change. I have no idea what the Universe might have planned for this unit and the awake-ness that uses it.

You see, that right there is an example of the language that comes about when you try to be precise about the distinction between the ego, the body and consciousness.

I am awake. I have always been awake. I am not a body. I am not an ego. I am not thoughts. I am not beliefs. I am not opinions. I am not stories.

The ego personality was not awake. It is not awake. It can never be awake, because it is an illusion.

All those texts that I read for years about attaining enlightenment suddenly make sense. I suspect that people have failed to become enlightened over the years because they did not realise that the texts and the teachings were presenting two different views.

People think that they are an ego. They believe their ego is real. They identify themselves as their ego. Their ego maintains control and hides reality from them. Reality is always there. Awake-ness is always there.

This is why so much of the training that is undertaken by mystics such as the Sufis, the cloistered monks of Christianity, those seeking Advaita, practitioners of Zen, Chan and other forms of Buddhism and a myriad of other seekers is focused on dissolving the ego, even if they don't call it that.

Once you are awake, the ego is seen to be fiction. The ego is seen to be a character that you have played for your life so far. All the separation is an illusion. As Fred Davis from South Carolina would say, 'there is a sense of Fred-ness, but there is no Fred.' [2]

I think that is enough for today. It took 41 years to get here, so I guess 'my' ego was particularly pigheaded. Now the real work begins.

Chop wood, carry water.

[1] http://liberationunleashed.com/
[2] http://awakeningclaritynow.com/