From time to time I have to refer to a certain "perspective" and those not familiar with my other posts will not understand what I am talking about. So I thought it might help to summarize it in one place that can be referenced easily.

Also, I am interested in the feedback from all of the community members here. Not that I seek confirmation or particular advice. I am aware of how arrogant this might come across but be assured that that's not my intent. It's just that this perspective feels so right that I  am happy to stick with it unless it gets destroyed by very strong objections.

If that were to happen I would be very disappointed but I will not hesitate a second to revise it or abandon it completely. I am a scientist by training & therefore convinced that whatever "theory" doesn't stand the test of time should be revised or abandoned altogether, without regrets.

So this "perspective" in a nutshell is based on the understanding that reality can be apprehended in two different ways:

1. The conventional perspective: the untrained human consciousness apprehend reality as it appears. There are forms, sights, sounds, physical sensations, mental thoughts, etc.
These are apprehended as they appear from the perspective of an "I" or "Me" sitting here watching reality unfold over there.

2. The other perspective: the same reality in all its diversity is apprehended as having the same fundamental nature. It's simply "clear cognizance".
This clear cognizance has the properties of:
- "self-luminosity": there is no need to do anything. Just by virtue of being conscious reality manifests itself to itself without intermediary. There is no one to whom this is happening. Any sense of self is just another appearance, another happening.
- Radical Acceptance: everything is welcomed as it is. The good, the bad & the ugly. Nothing is rejected.
- Radical Letting Go: as everything starts disappearing as it arises, nothing is held or grasped. Its just relinquished as it is welcomed.

Clear cognizance is not altered nor affected in any way by whatever arises.

Hopefully I will have the opportunity to clarify this based on questions or challenges from you all.

From another thread:
Clear Cognizing is perceived directly, immediately & prior to any cognitive fabrications. This recognition is dormant in all human beings. It can probably be actualized spontaneously but this is probably exceedingly rare. However as human beings with a gift for memory and language any spontaneous awakening gets recorded, described, reflected on & commented profusely.

This is how we find ourselves today with traditions describing the desired state and how to realize it in all major civilizations.

With the teachings available it becomes possible for a greater number of people to  try and awaken this recognition. For all people the recognition whether spontaneous or triggered by teachings is usually brief. Just a glimpse.

For some the glimpse seems to come out of the blue and cannot be regained at will. For others, mostly those who developed it through "study", it can be called whenever one inclines the mind toward it.

I think this is where the idea of a third eye comes from. But regardless of whether this is true or not, I think the metaphor is apt.

For everyone with visual health just opening your eyes deploys a whole world of forms and colors. Imagine that this putative third eye does the same for clear cognizing. The default state of this eye is to be closed, however you just have to open it and clear cognizing is as vivid and real as the ordinary visual field.

With clear cognizing "eye" open, phenomena arise without being resisted in the least and they vanish immediately without any clinging whatsoever. When the "eye" is not actively maintained open, it shuts down and one is as deluded as everyone else.

From yet another thread:

As i see it the mind works in at least two radically different ways: the "deluded" & the "not-deluded". What i am referring to is not changing how the mind works but transitioning from one way (the deluded) to the other (the non-deluded").

I think of the non-deluded as the realm of "Emptiness is form & form is Emptiness". It's immediate. The ten thousand things are exactly clear cognizing. Fabrication & Delusion starts immediately afterwards with the split between clear cognizance and the ten thousand things & the Delusion of seprateness which leads to likes and dislikes, etc.

From another post:

​​​​​​​The "constructed mind" as I see it is what happens after the initial pre-conceptual perception happens.

The process in detail is as follows:
A sense organ comes into contact with a sense object;
There is immediately "the knowing of it". This knowing is effortless immediate & totally welcoming. This is "clear cognizing".
At the same time that there is "arising", "vanishing" happens with complete letting go.
This is the non-deluded state. Before any further fabrication.

In the deluded state however, the "immediate knowing"is obscured and the person dwells on the further fabrications that start with liking/disliking and can keep burgeoning endlessly..

From yet another post:
Radical Acceptance is manifested by the utter effortless-ness of experience. Before the constructed mind kicks in, anything & everything is welcomed.

Radical letting go is manifested by the utter transience of phenomena. Nothing lasts for even a second & things are released with the same ease with which they were welcomed.

This could be used as the gold standard for realization: if there is the slightest hint of resistance to experience, or clinging  to it, then that ain't clear cognizing.

From yet another post:
My contention is that when clear cognizance is directly realized, however one arrives there, attraction/aversion are no longer an issue.

i certainly might be mistaken but this is the things appear to me. It's as obvious & clear as seing redness for a person with normal vision. You just open your eyes & it's there, effortlessly, immediately, nothing to do.

similarly, you look with clear cognizing & "see" that Radical Acceptance is there & therefore aversion cannot be. Also, Radical letting go is there & therefore clinging cannot be.
plain & simple.

From yet another post:
Delusion (capital D) as I see it is the root cause of suffering. It's seeing only the ten thousand things, like seeing one side of the coin, so to speak. Cutting through "Delusion" is still seeing the ten thousand things & at the same time, seeing also the other side of the coin: clear Cognizing, which is what made seeing the ten thousand things possible to begin with.

Your second perspective sounds very much like the so called True Self.
I remember you don't do ascetic practices and use consciousness to practice right? It would explain why you are capable of True Self.
Of course it has forms and grades which depend on amount of consciousness and certain changes within the mind like for example 4th path 'flip' as its some times called makes it much more... I wanted to say something akin to luminous but its not it. Luminosity is actually impression of copies of consciousness. Its more like 4th path change makes any luminosity being replaced with rawness of whatever it is that is happening in mind. It is like luminosity but also it is not luminosity.

I mention this because I think at your level you might actually need it to assess your path. Say not that long from now, how does it sounds? I mean less than a decade ;)

To my taste the way you describe is lacking in one aspect which maybe is rare but I still find it being a part of the path to full enlightenment. That would be what I call all-sense-synesthesia...

Two decades ago I did something in my mind that caused signals to go unobstructed by any order in which they would normally arise and this caused me to experience senses as decoded by faculties of other senses. So for example you look in the direction of an apple and what do you experience? Normally it was this as you call conventional perspective with perhaps some impression of you watching an apple and maybe you thinking of an apple and thinking of its taste and somehow knowing what it is. It is knowing the taste but not really having experience of the taste that feels like tasting it - yet its obviously some kind of apple taste. Now synesthesia is done by removing signals within the brain which synchronize activity including of sense modalities so when you see you don't taste. When you think you don't taste but when you think about taste it can happen at moments the taste goes through. When synchronization is removed then when you see and your mind generates impression of taste you just experience it then and there. No thinking required ;)

It isn't actually that hard to figure out how to do it. Don't be overwhelmed by hints like "synchronization signals" - its just something about aspect of self which exists in both of your perspectives but these differ in something else missing in 2nd perspective. You have obviously realized there is something in your mind, some experience and I get you consciously chose to not experience it which gave rise to your clear cognizing. Similar aspect of sense of self related to synchronization of senses exists within mind (easy to find in e.g. eyes ;)) and you can do similar thing and consciously choose to not experience it (or just experience it less as to not get overwhelmed by the synesthesia like I did - though at that time I wasn't even remotely ready for what I was playing with).

For me something like you describe as your 2nd mode was done AFTER I did it with senses but what I find funny is that tendency to call it similar. I called this whole way to perceive just "2nd mind mode" and in regards not to senses themselves but in regards to internal closer-to-sense-of-self I did it the same way and my understanding of how it works is also the same - its loosening or even removing synchronization signals allowing brain to send signals between its parts unobstructed by specific order which these synchronization signals force.

I eventually developed other "modes".
3rd being something to do with mathematics - algorithms... nothing that useful but its fun to generate fractals and other artificial experiences.
4th is what I always called "vajra mind" or in other words "error corrected" mind.
Error correction... what error... how to correct for them... why are they relevant?
I first and foremost practiced sensual perception and I needed error correction to improve eyesight. Its more like DLSS/FSR in computer graphics/games when applied to eyesight but it does equalize responses for any faculty by using more of them and finding differences. It also causes mind to not need to constantly process the same thing over again and reduce activity when there are enough consciousnesses which agree on results and any errorous results are thrown out - and by it I mean they aren't discarded but if you had 10 seeing pulses of some object and one of them is totally different then it might be object for this one moment was different but its probably just an error. Now different parts of brain for eyesight process the same stimuli differently so using more of them in this way not only extracts more details from photosensitive cells in my eyes giving better resolution but overall look of what I am looking at will be more consistent and less likely to be influenced by some part of brain having tough day. Of course the basis on which this thing works is something that we normally use with perception but if you consciously practice it and understand you can supercharge it making it much better.
There is also 5th mode but its something I am still developing and is way more complex. Maybe some day I'll be describing it on DhO ;)

Anyways I treated your thread as invitation to throw some ideas at you.
I won't shatter your views because imho you are doing quite well. Unless you have this small hope this 2nd mode is something ultimate then yeah: consider your views to be in need of shattering because the only limit to consciousness is your ingenuity in developing it. Of course when I developed error corrected consciousness I considered it ultimate - and it kinda is state of the art there is nothing intrinsic to it. Its a fancy development just like all our consciousnesses are. Real consciousness is like when you take a rock and feel it. Its raw consciousness - of as Zen master might tell you "the best consciousness is no consciousness" then to imagine what they mean its how rocks experience... there is an experience but no movement inside it to experience it.

Anyways, I really recommend this sense synesthesia tinggy and you might want to play with error correction. I use 7th jhana to check for locations non-active parts of mind and use 8th jhana to pre-set them to only get active once and then keep active only as consciousness. I found behavior like that when tryign to somehow achieve "half activation" or something like that. You'll surely figure that out if you give it a spin.

Also one note: If you feel you don't understand what I said talk with your mind and say to them this: "stop bitching about not understanding and leave what Ni said 'floating' with note 'to ponder when I have nothing better to do', tank's for your attention!". I mention this because it often feels like I write too much with too much details using foreign terms and people just mark everything I said as "not understandable" and block themselves from benefiting from what I wrote. It is not my intention to people parrot what I say but to them to understand stuff so they can later come and write something that can be useful for me.

And where it comes to being useful - I'll try to give your clear cognizing a spin to really check if I actually ever did it the same way. I haven't read all your posts yet but I'll do it. The thing with these things is that pondering about how other people do it can often develop new ideas, solutions, etc. Find blank spots. I had it already happen that meditating on other people descriptions did lead to new developments. And its why I bother writing my descriptions.

Lastly I need to point out that I find people descriptions when they use their words and not try to make them understandable by imaginary "random Joe" to be the best to meditate on. I mention this also because I often got responses from people that I should somehow make my descriptions sound more like dharma books because according to them understanding is in feeling familiarity while reading. I deliberately use my words which I use internally because that is the best way to not give false impression. Its always the NEW mind which arises in response to someone words which is what is the right understanding and not responses of familiarity within old mind. Also why I said I will need to meditate on what you said. I do get vague image of mind to which you point to (or as I call it 'visualized mind state' - I did practice it a lot a lot) but I also get lots of hits from memories of my own states which interfere so I need to focus on the task and avoid these hits by having those memories not arise and rather crystalize something that matches your descriptions perfectly that of course will be influenced by experiences my mind had but the point is to not focus on experience of familiarity and not optimize for it and rather on matching someone descriptions. In a sense that I would focus on the same things as the person if my mind state was the same.

BTW. Its how its possible to speed up attaining any mind state including Daniel's 4th path.
People I think/feel avid these methods because they believe in inherent existence of things... but that's just silly. We all get 'scripted' so I might as well become Arhat/master in it. After I experience someone mind state and fill my mind with it I can then practice to refine any details. Its hella lot better way to do dharmas than sit and wait while doing ascetic practices or something until mind does exactly the same thing but unconsciously and actually worse in the sense of accuracy. Any corrections, improvements and the like are of course possible either way but more skill in doing it consciously.

Metta Fruitions,
Ni

ps. I bother writing all these advanced things to you because you said you don't do ascetism. Do not obsess over but do 4th path ASAP. We need more conscious arhats around these parts ;)
Also don't mind if you feel it has to be done differently than what I point at. Its the mass and fidelity of insights and more than anything consciousness that counts. In the end there are lots of different ways. Some are different ways to do the same thing and some are different things which can lead to similar results. In either way I want people to put conscious effort and be inventive/creative so we can all benefit from their efforts. Last thing I want is anyone to cling to any solution and proclaim its the ultimate thing. And even if you do it your way please do consider figuring out synesthesia thing - its absolutely bloody amazing! Eyes - check focus. Defocus, don't use focus!, let them refocus by themselves. Sunshine & Rainbows!