Thank youuuu! I am grateful to have you here. …15:08 “…as long as there is life there will be ups & downs… try to understand where peace is to be found & how to get there. “ I have been listening to you for 2 weeks. I have followed Nisargadatta for maybe 20 yrs. I cannot put into words rather …understanding in non words, in a smile, or a fresh sweet nowness. Thank you.
Your videos are the most beautiful and profound videos on utube. Thank you for sharing your insights. The quality of your videos really touch me. The gentleness in your voice and teachings is almost overwhelming. ❤
I love how you went onto talking about translating as well 😅 I wanted to go back to sleeping during meditation. I there’s this dualistic idea about sleep being kind of a means of coping with the world/escape route from traumatic experiences which makes a lot of sense to me since it describes this return to self which is a place of replenishment indeed. So based off that I find myself to be able to fall asleep very easily in any situation or position of my body. And at the same time I had experiences and hence a certain expectation of what it “feels like” to meditate. Not even talking about the surreal physical sensations of no body but even simply this sense of spaciousness from letting go of the thought that I’ve had while awake and on the go. So when I hear an explanation like yours (this isn’t first time I hear this) that falling asleep is just that samadhi i really can’t place it well because it really don’t feel like it (maybe wrong words?) as in there’s definitely none of the awareness or exploration present. Or if there is, then who’s exploring? Because I thought it’s the person/bodymind who’s exploring since the one is already aware of totality of self? And if that’s how it’s supposed to be then: a) why do we bother meditating if it’s same as sleep? B) what are those other meditative experiences then? I understand I use the word experience but maybe u have some kind of very simplistic analogy to put it more clear like what’s relation between regular sleep, awareness behind experience (of which I perceive an absence of when I sleep(?)) and meditation (which I grown to understand as an exploration of awareness)?
The meditation here is Self-inquiry in which the only question is, "Who am I?" or "What am I?" It soon becomes clear that this question cannot be answered by any possible experience. Because no matter what the experience, who was it that experienced it? So, Self-inquiry proceeds by whittling away at the concepts of self. Finally, you begin to inquire into what are you in the absence of everything. What am I in the absence of experience? What was your original face before you were born? > as in there’s definitely none of the awareness or exploration present. Or if there is, then who’s exploring? If there is no You/ Awareness present in the absence of experience, what is it that notices the return of experience? Is it someone or something else? You can answer this question through the transition from deep sleep/ samadhi to waking up. When you catch experience arise from what is considered a blank and empty state, you see that state is not a state but is in fact the true meaning of I -- pure Awareness/ Consciousness/ Sentience. Sat-Chit-Ananda.
Namaste. I am a first time poster but I've listened to all your contemplations at least twice. They were clear on first listening and clearer on the second re-listening. Hence, I can totally relate to the final point on clarity. Advaita Vedanta methodology of Sravana Manana Nididhyanasa certainly applies here, too. Keep up the excellent work! Much love, Bharat
Thank you 🙏. Sravana Manana Nididhyasana describes it well. The quality of the listening and the contemplation makes all the difference. I am glad to hear your contemplations have brought clarity.
Thank you so much for your honest and direct response to my question about experience after death. Your compassion and love for other beings is evident in your honest and gentle approach to the difficult questions brought to you. Thank you for being an honorable man & providing a place for us who are seeking answers to such difficult questions, Your channel has provided me much comfort. a place to share or express deeply meaningful sometimes private thoughts with others with out judgment. May you be surrounded by love, ❤️ & light, 🕯️
I wasn't aware of being aware till the I appeared on me. But this I got entangled with the world, with desires, with good and bad, with becoming.... and this veil appeared between me and myself and between me and realty, the mirror got stained and whatever I see is transformed by the non-I and covered the pure of the pure which is so close, closer than the seeing itself. Now I know but I am still cleaning the mirror day after day just to be pure awareness.
This reminded me of Master Hui-neng's response to Shen-hsui. Shen-hsui wrote this verse on his understanding: "Our body is the Bodhi-tree, And our mind a mirror bright. Carefully wipe them hour by hour, And let no dust alight." Hui-neng responded with this: "Bodhi originally has no tree, The mirror has no stand. Buddha-nature is always clean and pure; Where is there room for dust (to alight)?" The verse led to Hui-neng being chosen as the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism.
@untangle-your-mind In reality the awareness is always pure as the dust is the false views and they have no real existence. It seems the response from Hui-Neng is to tell Shen-Hsui that he attained the pure consciousness of the self and in this sate there is no dust and no body. Thanks for reminding me of that :-)
Oh lord. I completely missed this! My notifications for some reason became completely empty recently. Thank you for your response! This was very interesting in a few ways. One because I got to understand a bit better what you mean already through the beginning of this video even tho i forgot about my question, another that I realized that maybe I’m mashing up too many different concepts/words. For I been using love/soul/god/consciousness/awareness interchangeably and I see a bit more clearly the differences you imply between those. However, I feel like maybe when I mean god is love it feels to me synonymous to “true self is bliss”. I can see that “peace” in the dimension of experience could be quite unpleasant and it also explains why some people do have a certain sense of aversion to this word, while I came to understand apparently (I just realized it xD) that peace is a dimension behind the experience aka the rootedness in self rather than experiential emptiness 🤔
So then the question arises is what’s the difference between the peace of non experience and bliss of abiding in self? If they’re different at all? Or am I mixing something up here
Oh! And I’m seeing that you’re using sentience for what I would normally perceive to be referred as consciousness. And then u refer to consciousness as an experience of the mind? Am I anywhere close at all? 😁 i understand that these could also be a matter of translation as well? In the case of referring to or deriving a teaching from an old traditional philosophy(?) I really liked that you pointed out that the I is always refers to that eternal I no matter if the person is aware and somehow that’s how consciousness feels to me, of course on the base of my relative subjective experience XD but I find that this universality is very much present and there’s not any meaningful way to separate categorically even between “my” actions and experiences as a “person/mind/what you call consciousness?” From what u call sentience, I call consciousness and many people call life or god(?) I hope my translation is close enough for this sentence to make sense :) why I’m asking all this is because i understand that differences in naming things are gonna exist even within one language so I want to understand the structural/relational gist of it and this process of translating is something that I’m really interested in so i really want to understand the layers and the depth of this “model”(couldn’t find a better word for it)
> So then the question arises is what’s the difference between the peace of non experience and bliss of abiding in self? If they’re different at all? It is the same peace/ bliss that is always present. It is one aspect of the nature of Self -- the 'Ananda' in SatChitAnanda. Whether the peace is palpable depends on what the Self is taken to be in that moment. When the Self is mistaken to be an individual, the gross experiences are more prominent. When the Self is seen to be beyond the distinction of subject and object, then the bliss of being is felt even in the presence of experience. > And I’m seeing that you’re using sentience for what I would normally perceive to be referred as consciousness. And then u refer to consciousness as an experience of the mind? Am I anywhere close at all? Yes, I prefer to use Sentience just because of how it hit home in my own case. In the spiritual search, the term 'consciousness' is heard of and thought of so often, that the intimacy of meaning gets lost. It feels like the 'self' is one thing, and 'pure consciousness' is what is to be experienced, or known, or merged into, and so on. But the term Sentience is used less often and so it has the possibility of cutting through that misconception. You are not a sentient thing, but simply Sentience itself. The Self is pure Sentience/ Conscious-ness/ Aware-ness. But if consciousness is conceived of as a particular stream of consciousness; the experiences related to one body-mind, then it must be pointed out that you are not this stream of consciousness. Then you are what is prior to consciousness.
I will try. Realisation brings relief from psychological pain and changes the relationship to physical pain, but physical pain is still most acutely felt. So I can't tell someone in pain that there is a cure. As long as there is consciousness, there will be pain in one form or another. We can only work on making it bearable. Wishing you better health ❤️ .
I believe it was Krishnamurti that said “Once you are aware that you are aware you are no longer aware.” How does that tie in. Just found you today and I must say, I quite enjoy your explanations.
I'm unfamiliar with that quote, but it hinges on what is meant by 'you'. When there is the awareness of being aware, there is no sense of you as a person, an individual subject, or sentient entity. That which was mistakenly taken to be 'you' is seen to be part of the experience and hence not aware or sentient. Then there is just Reality being aware of the presence of Reality.
@@untangle-your-mind ah so, I do not know the context with which that quote was taken so it’s impossible to say if he illustrated further or not. What you just pointed too makes perfect sense. Right on the money. Thank you.
Your answer to the first question made me realise something. I've listened to it before and kind of nodded along, like yes the character and the world it appears in must be the same type of illusion OK. But I never really paid a lot of attention to this answer because I didn't relate to the idea that I'm one character in the dream and a different character in the waking state. I'm the exact same character in both "places", to a ridiculous degree where I'm constantly trying to solve my "real world" problems in my dreams. But I was missing a really obvious point here. If I'm the same character in both, and the dream world is obviously an illusion, and we know that the character is the same as the world it appears in...🤦♀️ Omg!! It's obviously all an illusion, both worlds and this same character. (Yet this waking world appears so real.)
Haha! A significant 'Doh!' moment. Next, you can notice that while the waking world feels very real, so does the dream world while in the dream. Such reality is being borrowed from what is fundamentally real -- You/ Aware-ness that make the sleeping, dreaming, waking possible.
Headless voice, would you squash or poison spiders in your house if you were getting bitten regularly, or exterminate rodents living in the roof if they were keeping you up at night?
Sure. But I am not the one who makes such decisions or does anything. That all takes place autonomously, based on the configuration of this body-mind unit at that point in time. Experience is always at the very end of a process; an intricate chain of cause and effect. I only know of what has happened in the moment that the experience appears, after all the causal factors involved have already played their part. So, I; that which is aware of experience, am not involved in what takes place. There is only a knowing. And if there is any sense of agency, upon inspection, it can be seen that sense is also just a thought which itself is part of the experience. The Self is completely outside the bounds of causality and ethics and so on. Reality cannot be understood based on the behaviour of any particular creature living on the crust of this planet.
@untangle-your-mind sense of agency is just a thought. If I hadn't recently experienced thought as a sense, that would be hard to grasp. Even now it's feeling kinda slippery. Like it pops into and out of absurdity and sense.
I do find at this point ethics are coming to mind a lot. There is a lot of guilt if behaviour is harmful/unpleasant to others. Anything un-saintlike! The interesting thing is that this is occurring in a field of a kind of detached calm that more often than not is in the foreground. But it's still uncomfortable, so I thought I'd ask, and I'm grateful for your response.
The principle of non-violence, or the golden rule, is worth living by, because all violence is felt by the Self. But there is the practical matter that there is no one in control of all that has conditioned this mind up to this point! Even the guilt is violence. The path of Jnana is to know what you are, and that Knowledge itself sorts out most of the thinking and behaviour.
@@untangle-your-mind I fully see that the guilt is violence as well. This is such a painful situation here. It seems the less painful path is to just keep getting bitten!