Comments by Soh:

I shared MCTB with John Tan back in 2006. I was quite skeptical of his book due to his claims at that time (putting the title 'Arahat' on the front cover of his book!), given that Daniel is claiming quite a high attainment (and generally, there is a taboo to claiming any attainments in the first place). John read the contents and got back to me, and informed me that "his understanding is thorough.. ...you should take this self-proclaimed arahat seriously. (he) got liao4 (substance)", "he is truly enlightened". And he also suggested in some way that, Daniel was the one with the most clear description of enlightenment he has seen (at that time). Afterwards I read the whole book and took it seriously. It is a very practical guide and full of great advises, although the path presented was not the exact path I took (I went into self-inquiry and awareness teachings first that led to Self-Realization, but the further insights into non-dual luminosity and anatta converge later at third and fourth path of MCTB).

(His proclamation of arahantship is a controversial topic I shall not get into. But I should add that it is not just him who claims arahantship, but his teacher from the Mahasi Sayadaw lineage who himself considers himself to be an arahant also confirmed Daniel's "arahantship" and asked him to teach. I shall not comment on how this lines up with traditional criterias, but just to present a bit of his story.)



Nikolai posted:



Revised 2nd Edition Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha- the author Daniel Ingram has given free access to it.

The original edition back in 2008 served me too well as a game changer for permanent perceptual brain changes.

Regardless of any initial feelings his outright claims triggered in me, the information inside this book was pivotal in me ceasing to spin wheels in my previous practice to then fabricate a gapless practice that quickly led to the permanent and extremely positive brain changes that I’ve incessantly gone on about in this blog over the past 8 years. The book that gave birth to the Pragmatic Dharma Movement. Nuff said.

Highly recommended.


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I wrote in 2013:



V: "...there is somewhere a One Thinker (of thought)"

Me: "A thinker is thinking a thought" is simply a construct of a faulty framework and view of inherent and dualistic self. Just like language is structured in a way that it often requires subject-action-object predicates, making us to say things like "the wind is blowing", "I am thinking a thought"... but is there really a truly existing and independent thing called "the wind" that "is blowing" or is "wind" and "blowing" simply two words referring to a single activity? Likewise is there truly an "I" that is "thinking, a thought" or is "I", "thinking", and "thought" three different labels imputed on a single activity? Seer, seeing and seen are just a conventional view... they only appear as separate, independent existences due to ignorance but such a view does not tally with reality.

River is flowing doesn't mean there is an independent thing called "river" that is "flowing", it actually means river IS the flowing and apart from the flowing there is no river... just conventional labels applied to a single activity. Wind is blowing means wind IS the blowing and apart from blowing there is no other wind... seeing the scenery means seeing IS the seen/scenery and apart from that seen/scenery there is no other seeing (nor a separate seer), there is no other consciousness apart from the specific manifest experience - seen/heard/sensed/smelled/touched/cognized. Mere conventions applied to a single activity, appearing to co-locate with each other in an independent and separate manner due to a distorted view that causes us to misperceive reality in a fundamental way, just like mis-perceiving a rope as a snake. Once we see that there isn't anything that 'nouns' point to than pure action/activity, then the verb alone is sufficient - 'blowing', 'flowing', 'thinking', 'seeing' - which is none other than the seen, thought, etc. There is no 'you', 'seer', 'thinker' apart from seeing which is sight, hearing which is sound, etc.

When we directly contemplate, investigate and challenge our view of 'seer-seeing-seen' and see that in the seen is merely the seen - that seeing is simply the seen and seen is just the seeing without any seer apart, that there is no other consciousness apart from the 'mere seen/mere cognized', a permanent quantum shift of perception takes place. When this is directly realized in one's experience and not merely understood inferentially, any delusion of agency (doer, controller, feeler), subject-object/perceiver-perceived gaps, divisions are seen through, the gapless/undivided self-clarity of experience without an agent, center or boundaries simply shines vividly in its raw, direct, unfiltered purity, and just that is free and liberating in itself. Later comes this seeing - the mind, the body, the breathing, the environment, in seamless exertion!

V: "Yes... only verbs... This is a great pointer!!!! Wow!!! Thank you Soh! I will sit with that pointer! It is so powerful! It is blowing my "mind" ! How could there ever be a story only with verbs? Yes! Yes! That's it! A verb can't "build" a self. Thank you so much!!!!!"
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In this video, Adyashanti and Susanne Marie discusses the transition from Unity Consciousness and Divine Self (I AM and One Mind phase) phase to No-Self. On another note. I just wrote to our dear Jax after he remarked how rare spiritual realization is: "...when i first realised anatta i was so disappointed that only so few in the world realised anatta, i wrote about it
in my ebook
and i lost confidence in the various traditions in the world and was a bit disheartened. bcos i have already been through those insights and seen beyond that
but if u look deeper, its there in the texts of the various traditions whether dzogchen, mahamudra or zen or theravada. just that few modern teachers are realised.
i recently said to someone that among those with spiritual realizations, maybe 80% are I AM, 10% are one mind, only 2% or less are about anatta and emptiness
which is why i always share the contents of spiritual teachers i find are clear about anatta and emptiness because they are rare jems that need to be brought to light in the spiritual marketplace"


The purpose is not to brag about this or that realization but to point out the rarity of this and therefore treasure it. It is the path to liberation.
p.s. not that any sort of realization is a finality! It's really just another beginning of endless practice-actualization...

By John Astin, http://www.johnastin.com/blo
Awareness is Experience
Published on May 23, 2016, by admin in Uncategorized.
In many teachings, an emphasis is placed on “recognizing” or “resting as” awareness. In this modeling of reality, awareness (i.e., that which knows) is portrayed as a special, separate privileged domain apart from, untouched by and free from its perceived content (what’s known). However, this purported separation is simply not the case, at least not experientially.
In direct experience, awareness and phenomena never appear alone but always co-occur. The perceiver and perceived always arise together and therefore represent a singular movement or reality. They arrive as a package deal. There is never actually a perceived object without a subject that perceives it, nor a perceiver without something being perceived. While the two (perceiver and perceived, subject and object) appear separate and distinguishable, in point of fact, they can never be teased apart. The subject literally depends upon the object for its existence and vice versa, awareness and its content, each known by the presence of the other.
Now some teachings will claim that there exists a domain of “pure” awareness, an awareness that has no phenomenal content in it. However, a content-less or object-less awareness is really an abstraction for in order to exist as an actuality, awareness must be experienced. And the moment it is experienced, that experience (of awareness) becomes the content of awareness. It may be an exceedingly subtle, barely perceptible content. But it’s still content, still experience, still an “object” of awareness that is known, even if that object is awareness itself.
From this vantage, we can say that to experience anything is to experience awareness (i.e., the faculty of knowing or perceiving) for awareness is inseparable from whatever is being experienced. They are one and the same reality. And because experiencing never comes to a stop (i.e., it’s continuous), recognizing awareness must also by definition be uninterrupted. In other words, there’s no need to try to sustain awareness for awareness is self-sustaining as the flow of experiencing itself, a flow that is always happening!
And so there is no actual place to go to “find” something called awareness that we can rest in, no need to quiet or stop thinking in order to recognize awareness. Awareness is simply this, this perception, this thought, this feeling, this sensation, this present experience. After all, what else could awareness possibly be?
This
Published on April 22, 2018, by admin in Uncategorized.
Spiritual traditions tend to speak about awareness and its content (experience) as two distinct domains. And while there is often an acknowledgement that these are really just two sides of the same indescribable non-dual coin, most traditions tend to emphasize this distinction, pointing again and again to the ever-present knowing/cognizing that underlies every momentary experience.
However, as powerful as this awareness-based emphasis can be, what I and others I’ve worked with invariably bump up against is that the recognition of awareness seems to come and go; sometimes it feels as if it is being recognized but sometimes not. And then whenever it seemed as if it has slipped away, there is this understandable effort to re-capture or re-recognize awareness.
But some years ago, it began to dawn on me; the experiences I was labeling as “awareness being absent” were actually 100% present. What is thought of as the non-recognition of awareness is simply another experience that is being recognized! Whatever we might call it—experience, reality, existence—something is always present even if that which is present is constantly slipping away, constantly morphing, constantly refreshing itself. This presence, let’s call it experiencing itself, never goes away. Sometimes it appears as awareness recognizing its ever-present nature; sometimes it shows up as awareness seemingly slipping away. But the experiencing is relentless.
And so in large part because of this, I find myself in my teaching emphasizing the experience side of the non-dual coin. I point to the fact that experiencing itself never turns off and that this ever-present, unstoppable flow of experiencing is actually the revelation of awareness. Two sides of a single coin, awareness and experience.
I find my favorite word to point to this singularity is This. Just This. This momentary flash that dissolves no sooner than it appears. This that is ever-present yet in constant flux. This that can never disappear and yet is constantly disappearing. This that cannot be characterized and yet appears as all characterizations. There are no words for This, no finite descriptions or pointers that could ever hope to capture Its infinite, unresolvable, indescribable nature. This, just This, This constancy that appears as all discontinuity and change…
Part of the challenge in talking about this is that when we hear words such as awareness or the ground of being, we imagine these are pointing to some dimension of reality that is distinct from other dimensions. In other words, if we have a term for something (awareness, ground of being), that MUST mean there is something that is distinct from the reality that word or phrase is pointing to. Otherwise, why even have the words in the first place!
It’s like the word God; the very existence of the word suggests there is something other than whatever entity or being or presence of divinity that word is referring to. But really, there is no God because there is ONLY God! From this vantage, all words are effectively synonyms for the same “thing.” Sorrow, joy, recognition, non-recognition, self, no-self, clarity, confusion… all the display of This.
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https://www.adyashanti.org/
From Adyashanti's Omega Institute Retreat, September 25, 2017.
I've been asked many times, “Adya, I'm experiencing this strange sort of fear, like I'm at the door of some void, and it's just going to swallow me. And somehow I'm strangely, deeply compelled towards it, and absolutely terrified of it, because it feels like it's going to be the end of me.” It's very common in doing this kind of deep work that you can run into this.
Ultimately, in the end, we see through self, but at that point, self isn't a thought and it's not really a feeling, except for fear. It's something you can't identify, like some sort of presence of being that feels extraordinarily threatened. When this really opens up, you quite literally experience the disappearance of everything you know. It seems like the body, the mind, the entire world -- all of existence blinks out of existence.
In a certain sense, the most real sense that there can be, you actually do go through a death. It's not the same thing as a near-death experience -- as transformative as those can be -- it's a death experience. It's the thing we're afraid of, because you think of your body dying, which is what most people are afraid of. But you're only afraid of your body dying because you think that you are associated with the body. What is it that's associated with the body? It's you.
If you were 100% completely convinced that you survive your body dying, death wouldn't feel like a threat to you at all. But since the identification runs so deep there, any threat to your body feels like a threat to your life—as a threat to your ideas can feel like a threat to your life. If you let go here, it feels like, "I will cease to be." This is to experience the death of the entire ego identity. If it really happens all the way through, something doesn't come back from it. There is an irrevocable change or transformation. The good news is that you aren't what you feel is going to die. The only way to know that entirely is for it to die.
My hunch is that when the Buddha associated nirvana with extinction and cessation, this is what he was talking about: to yank identity up from the root. Because until then, it is the journey of identity: "I'm me" -- whatever your sense of yourself is -- "Oh, I'm not, I'm the aware space." And then you have emotional identities: "I'm this open, wide, loving, benevolent presence. That's what I am -- beautiful." Or "I am That -- everywhere I look, there I am." Or if you're a little bit differently oriented, "Everywhere I look, there's the face of God. Okay, now that is what I am. I'm a son or daughter of God."
The fear of it is that it is the death of identity, which is almost impossible to contemplate. The journey is that the identity gets more and more transparent and boundless, until finally identity itself falls away. Then the question "What is it that I am?" is no longer there—not because you have an answer, but because identity is no longer relevant.
In conventional language, you may give it a name like "the infinite." I call it "pure potentiality." There are different ways the void is talked about, and this is one of them. Pure potentiality would necessarily be void if it's pure -- no manifestation at all—pure potential, pure creative impulse.
That doesn't mean that you no longer have a personality, that you no longer have human things about you, that you no longer have a certain kind of principle that orients you—you may even call that an identity. But you no longer find self in identity, and so it's freed up.
When the Buddha says "enlightenment," one way of articulating it is that it's the freedom from identity, from having to be or not be anything. Does that mean you no longer experience the oneness, being everything, seeing the face of God, your true being, or Buddha nature in everything? No, that's still there. Things are still there, but there's no longer identity in them. I don't really know how to describe that, because the nature of it is beyond description. You can't even think about it. It's the borderline between being and nonbeing.
So this is just part of the journey: awakening at the level of mind, heart awakening to the unity of all things, and each one of these provides more spaciousness and openness. Your sense of yourself gets more and more transparent, therefore there's less to defend. There's less necessity to assert yourself in the world, which doesn't mean you are not an assertive being. You can still be a very assertive being.
How does all that translate down into your human experience? There's still a human being there. The human being hasn't started to glow and become incapable of any stupidity. It hasn't suddenly become God's shining example of utter perfection. Each dimension of being exists within its own dimension.
In my experience, what it does is it frees these dimensions up so they're no longer in conflict, and life is no longer about protecting and asserting a kind of ego structure. It's about something different. There are still other dimensions of our humanness that need attention if we want to be able to function well and have what we've realized be able to flow out into all the dimensions of what it is to be a human being.
© Adyashanti 2017
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The Daily Quote from Rupert Spira, 7th August 2018

By far the larger part of the apparently separate self exists as a feeling in the body, not just a thought in the mind. Until the non-dual understanding penetrates deeply into the body, though our understanding may be clear, we will continue to feel, act, perceive and relate in ways that betray the apparent existence of a separate self.
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John Tan
John Tan This is very good and insightful.
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· Reply · 2d · Edited
Kyle Dixon:


If by “awareness” we mean the mind’s cognition, then what we are aiming to recognize is that said cognition is not actually a substantial substrate that is the foundation for a discrete entity in the way we assume it is.

When we have the realization that our cognitive capacity, consciousness or whatever, is unable to be located, we are recognizing that the feeling of being an internal knower of external phenomena is a fallacious assumption that is structured through habitual conditioning in our own delusion regarding the actual nature of the phenomena we are experiencing.

When we really fail to locate the mind as a substantial knower of what is known, we again, as many have pointed out for years in this group and elsewhere, are experientially having an epiphany that there is no seer, hearer, feeler, etc., as an established entity.

This insight occurs in various ways and can unfold pertaining to (i) the mind, (ii) external appearances, (iii) in the individual sense gates related to both internal and external dimensions respectively, and so on.

On the other hand, a cognition that is locatable is simply the deluded assumption that our consciousness is an established internal substrate, and the mistaken notion of a discrete identity is based on that misconception.

Which is to say no cognition is actually locatable. We just feel that it is and suffer as a result.