Background: Male aged 51, of which thirty & some searching for don't know what.
Lately: still searching but don't care much about what might be found (is this possible? Probably still care very much at some level).

Where I live, saying a word about my search to any soul could lead me straight to final Nibbana! Mind you, this could be the final solution!

I have been practicing alone, in total secret, taking instructions from books and the web (takes a lot of effort to sift through ALL the junk for the few gems).

THIS is my only Sangha... That's (part of) why your advice is REALLY important to me.

Special thanks to:

Culadasa for writig "Mind illuminatd";
Daniel Ingram for writing "MCTB":
Shinzen Young for writing "Science of enlightenment".

PS
I apologize for the weird grammar & misused words:
English is my third language (learned it on my own, mostly reading Dharma and tons of science books: I am a geologist with interest in every branch of science but specifically the "social sciences").

EDIT:
In this thread, all my posts are questions, whether they look gramatically so or not. I am here, 'officially ' begging for feedback. I am including below some formulas to copy and past for those in a hurry:

"Who has time for this kind of bullshit?"
"You do not know what you're talking about! Do everybody a favor and shut up!"
"This is confused / confusing, nobody understands what you mean! Learn how to express yourself clearly, then come back!"
"This place is for serious practitioners! Go somewhere else!"

So here it goes... This is my first question to the Sangha:

What is your 'personal' experience of god (God or GOD)?
NOT what is written about god in MCTB or any other book (I've read many of those).

Thanx

I had a sudden and dramatic A&P experience after a brief introduction to Buddhist philosophy and meditation. It was as if I had been stuck in a dark room my whole life only to realize that the door wasn't locked. I suddenly appeared outside, nearly blinded by the bright, beautiful world. There seemed to be a loving intelligence radiating through the universe and for the first time in my life I knew that everything was ok and just right. I might call it God when referring to that experience, but since then I haven't needed to create God or find experience through God in practice. Investigating the 3 C's through 6 sense doors seems to do the trick.  

Nick O, Nice to see you here!

If I understand what you said:
You had a fireworks experience which left you at ease and you call that "God". But now you are beyond that. It is enough for you to see sensate experience as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not (or without) self. God was your creation but you don't need Him anymore.

What if what you experience while investigating the 3 Cs is a manifestation of god or even god himself?

Thanx.

I'll never be able to convey how deeply liberating and profoundly earth-shattering the experience was. I knew in an instant that I was forever changed and would forever experience the world differently. For someone who was, only a few seconds before, a brooding, cynical athiest, the experience seemed very supernatural and an act of (God) something "outside" of myself.

After doing a lot of Dharma research and eventually discovering insight practices/theory/maps, I was able to find an explanation that didn't require God, or one that didn't require God to be something outside myself. I learned how natural and relatively common the experience was.

The way I see it, whether God exists or not, when we talk about God we only create a concept of God. In that case, God can only really be direct experience. If that's the case, why create God when we can just call it "experience" or "impermanence" or even "unity". Trying to fit God somewhere in there seems arbitrary.

Using this logic, if I'm not completely full of shit, (total possibility), I did create God because God was only a preconceived idea that I could relate to this crazy experience I was having. And no, I don't need God anymore, because I have other more pragmatic ways of seeing the situation and successfully furthering "spiritual" development.

What if I experience a manifestation of God during 3 C's exploration? I will then be investigating a manifestation of God.

I'm all about exploring ideas of God, cosmic plans, souls, afterlives and the such probably more than the average pragmatic yogi. I just don't see any of those ideas helpful ways of seeing when it comes to practice as I haven't came across them in direct experience (yet?).

EDIT: Grammar             

Hi. Guess I'll bite. Your comment about having to practice in secrecy makes me wonder if you might have come from certain religious backgrounds. In any case, i got the 'this is my only Sangha' sentiment.

I grew up Catholic, but interestingly all of my spiritual experiences did not even veer close to it. The earliest was when I was about 7. Used to have this strange recurrent dreams as if I'm floating in the dark, in space, seeing the planets and stuff, and suddenly the whole universe inverted through me and then a blank. I'd wake up with a weird feeling after that. Around the same time (this was before the internet, and in a third world country with few TV programmes, so there was a lot of free time doing nothing) i had a 'vision' of multiple lives - no details, just a certain feeling that this had happened again and again and again. I was a weird kid.

My first A&P experience was rather pedestrian by comparison. Was into martial arts, read a book 'Confessions of an American Ninja Master', where the author described a meditation practice. Later i found it was a type of microcosmic orbit. Saw bright light, started tearing, salivating, feeling warmth, that sort of thing.

Three years ago had my first taste of silent retreat, a ten days affair with instructions in anapanasati and vipassana with some variant of using a visual mental object to focus on. Had loads of visions, some of which can be construed to be encounters with the divine, if i were of a more religious bent. Think wandering along a path and encountering luminous beings, with the most luminous standing blocking my way. Talk about the mind being unoriginal. One of most memorable experiences then was however accidentally stumbling into the fifth shamatha jhana (Base of Boundless Space) while nodding off. I didn't know any of these terms btw, had no knowledge of maps or jhana states, so just chalked it down as 'interesting experiences'.

So more recently after finding out about pragmatic dharma i was practising more, and of course there were more 'interesting experiences', but all seemed par for the course. A few days before (what i believe to be) stream entry, this was during a retreat, I had a rather strong experience, perhaps the most religious one i'd had ever. I think it was during choiceless awareness. I became conscious of how my hands felt, one on top of the other, forming a gentle curve. Somehow that morphed into hands gently enveloping my whole body - my own hands and yet... not? This was accompanied by a feeling of safety and unity so profound i was practically weeping (silently, of course).

My two cents. 

With metta,
J

In a nutshell you are like Laplace with regard to God: you do not need that hypothesis.

On the other hand, if I understood you correctly your personal experience of God is A&P while Daniel's experience of God corresponds to awakening.

Is this correct?

Right I am "from certain religious backgrounds"...

Sure. I am curious about the existence of God, but I don't see a missing piece in the universal puzzle to fit God. God or not, there is still "thus" or "IT" or "Tao" or what-have-you and there is still dependent arising. The program of the universe runs according to the laws of causes and conditions whether we think there's a God or not. Let me ask you, if God appeared before you and only said "I EXIST", and then vanished, would you live your life differently? 
Not neccessarily. I could have been in touch with God. Or a better explanation would be I was so dumbfounded by the disappearance of a massive amount of suffering and a mental clarity beyond anything I ever dreamed possible that I was convinced whatever happened opened a door to perceive the eternal all-loving intelligence. It sure seemed (at the time) God-like and supernatural, but it could have also just been neurological pathways suddenly finding a more efficient way to circulate. - Or - I like to think, for fun, in my less cynical moments, maybe it was both!

I can't speak for "awakening" if we are referring to stream entry, or 4th path, or post-technical 4th path, or buddhahood, or whatever the going classification of "awakened" is. I have yet to experience that territory. Maybe I'll see God swimming in the stream. 

As for Daniel, I would like to quote a passage from MCTB which I think nails it:

My reply to his "I exist" will be: No you do not...
As if I will live my life differently, the answer is: Nope!

What would be your own reaction?

LOL

To God I would laugh and say, "COOL! But how does that change anything? You're just another perception." and go about my business.  

Nick, Daniel,
But also ALL the others;

How is the position expressed by Nick above different from what is called "solipsism" in wester philosophy?

I'll probably let someone else take it from here - I'm hijacking the thread! But before an answer comes, I'm curious, In the same situation, if I were to change the word "God" to "blue orbs", would the idea of solipsism still have arisen? 

Nick, I'm sorry if my question has been offensive in any way.

To clarify a little bit:
I am genuinely interested in the difference between what we do and epistemological solipsism. In this regard if we replace "god" with "blue orbs" or "Nessie" or anything else for that matter, i think my question would still have arisen.

I am interested in this question not as iddle philosophising but as a matter of practice & direct experience.
When I sit all I can experience finally comes down to "mental constructs" and epistemological solipsism says something really close to this if not identical.

I hope that you and others will continue contributing which is really helping me clarify concepts that are necessary to actual practice. I kindly remind all of you that personally because of where I live, I have no one to talk to about these thorny issues.

I know that as practical, pragmatist Dharma seekers it is best if we simply "sit down & shut up" and I try to do that. Nevertheless I have come to the conclusion that what we do is a form of epistemology in the sense that what we seek is a form of knowledge. In this regard it doesn't hurt to look at the accumulated wisdom in this domain.

I am genuinely interested in what you all think about this, so I do not feel that you are hijacking the thread. Will you decide nevertheless to keep your thoughts for yourself henceforth I will respect that.

No offense taken! Really! I was just gauging how the idea of God affected your idea of solipsism. 

I'm not well read on the idea of solipsism so I don't really have a whole lot to say. I might point out that while your experience is nothing but mental constructs, there are still sense inputs that form those mental constructs. However, I fear this is opening a dualistic can of worms, so someone else may have to jump in to save me here.

I really appreciate your honest inquiry. I consider frequenting this forum and others essential to my practice as well as I also don't really have anyone to talk to about this stuff. There are a lot of brilliant people here and hopefully someone might jump in (its been a little quiet around here lately).  

POST DELETED DUE TO POSSIBLY OFFENSIVE CONTENT
~ DhO self moderation

Hey Bored Vacuum! Nice seeing you here!

I'm afraid you lost me here, but let me give it a try:
I assume you are talking from personal experience here, so let me kindly ask you:
What does doing the 10th Bhumi ordinary stuff boils down to in terms of direct experiencing ?
Have you had any direct experience of godhood? How does it translate in terms of ordinary stuff?

Am I way off the mark?

Thanx for chiming in!

Hi Todo

The term or concept or word god is very foreign to me. My experiences of light, joy bliss and being immersed in it, is just that....light and bliss. My experiences of expansiveness and bliss is also just that...

Hey van lu!
Very nice seeing you here!

I appreciate that the word or concept of god is alien to you. Does that mean that the underlying reality (if there is any) is also alien to you?

Until a few yeras ago the word "schadenfreude" was very foreign to me but once I encountered it I could understand it because the underlying reality was unfortunately known to me!

Is the word god foreign to you in a parallel way or is it foreign in a more deep, intractable way?
Of course I am not implying that you never heard of the word god!

By the way, it would be nice that each one of us define what he means by the word "god". I'll give it a try: god is what the awakened ones awaken to.

Thanx

POST DELETED DUE TO POSSIBLY OFFENSIVE CONTENT
~ DhO self moderation

Yo todo

1) reality to me is whatever sense experiences that is happening right now. Each moment is complete in its own, happening by itself.

2) th word god as I have heard and understood is an almighty entity, that’s foreign. Even with your definition of “ that which we awaken to “ is also foreign 

3) there is nothing that I can name or communicate about the nature of what I’m awakened to . To say anything about it is to conceptualise it....so ssshhhh. 

Hi Todo,

Sorry the response took a long time, I was having technical problems posting this. And I still haven't figured out how to quote just a line.

Firstly, apologies if my previous post offended you in any way. Without getting into details, it was just in my mind and there was some awareness of the difficulty.

Nick O: "if God appeared before you and only said "I EXIST", and the vanished..."

How do I know that was God though? All I'd have direct knowledge of was of seeing a figure appearing before me and saying that. Would I live my life differently? No. Even if I believed that figure was God. Assuming I believe in one.

Todo: "When I sit all I can experience finally comes down to "mental constructs"and epistemological solipsism says something really close to this if not identical"

If the view of an accident scene appeared before me and I see an injured person I would take out my mobile phone to call the ambulance instead of wondering if those are mental constructs. But why in the first scenario (God) I would be questioning what I perceive? Perhaps because it does not fit my worldview? That said, if said figure of God was perceived by everyone in the vicinity, or did something impressive like making an amputated limb grow back, I'd take it more seriously.

In any case, I dare say the obvious issues with solipsism are the existence of other seemingly sentient beings and the realities of one's own lack of omnipotence and omniscience. The solipsistic view reduces the relationship between oneself and the rest of the world into caricatures:

a. You are placed here by a superior intelligence which for whatever reason no longer exists or no longer makes itself known to you

b. You created this world yourself (or it is a figment of your imagination) and programmed it such that you have no knowledge that you have created it

c. Everything is your dream

There is no way to prove any of it. Unless you take the red pill...  

But perhaps one fine day while you/ I / we are sitting quietly minding our own business noting mental constructs something happens (or ceases to happen, as it were) and afterwards there isn't even any certainty that this mind exists... then it can't be solipsism either.

Anyway. I believe you exist, more than I believe a man in the sky does.

Wishing you well. May you be safe.

J


P.S. http://truecenterpublishing.com/zenstory/fish.html

When you say reality is sense experience, do you consider that that "sense experience" is a mental event or a direct apprehension of what is "out there"?

Sensory experiences is when consciousness in contact with stimulus at the 6 sense doors. Seeing is just seeing, hearing is just sound, thoughts is just thoughts.....so on

Bring sustained attentiveness to the self-aware, luminous, knowing essence of the mind.

My understanding of clinging was wrong, am I right?

I thought clinging was about "desiring things". Wanting to have the good and avoid the bad.

It lately dawned on me that clinging is rather about "identification" with the illusion of "being & things" in the first place! Seeing the intrinsic luminosity of reality, this understanding / insight seemed evident.

My interpretation of clinging: When the field collapses into self versus other, this versus that. In judgements, fears and longings...A tension in the heart/mind. So I'd agree it starts with creating identification of self and identification of object. 

You are in an airplane & your seat belt is securely fastened! You can then relax & enjoy the ride.... no amount of tension, crispation, pulling or pushing, etc. will have any effect whatsover on the voyage!
You receive information on the flight from the pilot, from the computer screen in front of you, by looking outside the window, etc. BUT there is nothing for you to do about that informaion... nothing is required! It's only FYI... So do yourself a favor, do not get in the way... let the crew do their jobs which they are trained & qualified for.

Awareness & its contents arising & vanishing together, dependent on causes & conditions... moment-by-moment: what's more?

<p>God as &quot;causes &amp; conditions&quot; - a new religion for a godless8 humanity.</p>

I have been rare here because i received little feedback on my previous enquiries. Nevertheless i am still sticking with the practice, all by myself. I seem to have no choice. For memory i have been meandering this path for the last thirty odd years.

I live in a poor third world country and have limited income myself. So going to Asia or anywhere else for retreats is simply out of the equation. People around here are 100% adept of the latest implementation of monotheism. I have been trying to explore the spirituality of that religion but found only various rituals repeated with little understanding.

All this to say that I come back with a question that has been floating in my head recently:

Since meta-cognition, sort of inherently involves some degree of duality, how does one check the absence of said duality

Very simply, the content of thoughts is always dualistic: that is the nature of how thought operates.

However, if one gets good at noticing the experience of thoughts, their auditory, visual, tactile, etc. aspects, one will notice that the experience of thoughts takes place in fluxing space of experience, just like everything else, and that fluxing experience is not dual.

Thus, work to properly perceive the experience of thoughts, and notice them as sensations that arise and vanish on their own in the context of this changing space of experience.

Thank you Daniel for your time, much appreciated.  To bring more specificity to my question while trying to keep it short:

My practice has recently been a sort of silent observation or immediate knowing of sensate experience. This happens mostly "on its own" during formal practice. Thought does arise from time to time and it is equally acknowledged.  I am trying to bring this quality to daily life with some moderate success although the mind does get distracted quite often. Particularly when the interaction is challenging and / or in an unfamiliar setting.

What I have realized is that sensations are pretty fast and when one looks closely at them one finds a lot of micro movements of attention from one sense door to another sense door.

In these conditions fluxing experience is mostly non-dual although one can still see some sensations that imply a sense of self or observer. These sensations appear also to be non-dual but I am not quite sure of that yet as they are very fleeting and have a slippery quality about them.

This is what brings my question: when one deliberately inclines the mind to catch these sensations and check whether they are dual or not, isn't one necessarily creating some sort of subtle duality? This sort of duality is pre-verbal or pre-conceptual if you will, but isn't it there nonetheless?

I ignored this kind of inquiry till I got involved in a 12 step program.  "Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

demanded some kind of understanding of 'god' so I could get to the next dang step.

What I realized was that the help was going to have to be perceivable, and that I was the one to do the perceiving, and that there was no way to know exactly how that perception would take place but it would be via an expanded definition of normal perception, and if it was to be of help it would probably have to be something that I didn't consciously come up with, that I wasn't in control of.  So I tuned into my feelings about billboards, almost imperceptible thoughts/impressions/glimmers from odd corners of my brain, awareness of feelings from any odd direction, etc. I came to feel blessed when I had some kind of new way of looking a things as a possibility of productively moving forward, and wherever that stuff was coming from was workable definition of 'god'.

aloha todo,

    I don't remember.

terry

from merton's "the way of chuang tzu"


WHEN KNOWLEDGE WENT NORTH


Knowledge wandered north
Looking for Tao, over the Dark Sea,
And up the Invisible Mountain.
There on the mountain he met
Non-Doing, the Speechless One.

He inquired:
"Please inform me, Sir,
By what system of thought
And what technique of meditation
I can apprehend Tao?
By what renunciation
Or what solitary retirement
May I rest in Tao?
Where must I start,
What road must I follow
To reach Tao?"

Such were his three questions.
Non-Doing, the Speechless One,
Made no reply.
Not only that,
He did not even know
How to reply!

Knowledge swung south
To the Bright Sea
And climbed the
Luminous Mountain
Called "Doubt's End."
Here he met
Act-on-Impulse, the Inspired Prophet,
And asked the same questions.

"Ah," cried the Inspired One,
"I have the answers, and I will reveal them!"
But just as he was about to tell everything,
He forgot all he had in mind.
Knowledge got no reply.
So Knowledge went at last
To the palace of Emperor Ti,
And asked his questions of Ti.

Ti replied:
"To exercise no-thought
And follow no-way of meditation
Is the first step toward understanding Tao.
To dwell nowhere
And rest in nothing
Is the first step toward resting in Tao.
To start from nowhere
And follow no road
Is the first step toward attaining Tao."

Knowledge replied: "You know this
And now I know it.
But the other two,
They did not know it.
What about that?
Who is right?"

Ti replied:
Only Non-Doing, the Speechless One,
Was perfectly right.
He did not know.
Act-on-Impulse, the Inspired Prophet,
Only seemed right
Because he had forgotten.
As for us,
We come nowhere near being right,
Since we have the answers.
"For he who knows does not speak,
He who speaks does not know"
And "The Wise Man gives instruction
Without the use of speech." 

This story got back
To Act-on-Impulse
Who agreed with
Ti's Way of putting it.
It is not reported
That Non-Doing ever heard of the matter
Or made any comment.
[xxii. r.]

aloha jun,

   It occurs to me that it might be possible for a person to see the I who experiences through the lens of the experience itself, rather than see the "experience" as an event in the stream of time and agency, aka conventional thinking. Like a paradigm shift, eh?

terry

aloha,

   This is really a very profound question. God indeed did just this, and we have records.

   The burning bush is just a desert creosote fire to the spiritually blind, and a direct manifestation of god to a prophet.

   If you were to actually have a true mystical experience, you would change your tune, bra. You could at least be open minded.

   Stuff happens all the time. Yesterday I was taking a very old friend to a place locally known as "swimming pools,"  a set of (more or less) accessible and level tide pools so perfect you imagine they were the original plan for the first artificial swimming pool. And they double as aquaria. The trip involved a lengthy hike down the coast after a long and rugged 4 wheel drive to kapanaia bay, and then either a rappel down or a series of switchbacks. We took the switchbacks for the dogs' sake, as they could go down at the ropes but couldn't climb back up. Anyhows, on the way in I was explaing to my friend about aumakua, the "household gods" of the hawaiians. In practice, whenever one of the more unusual, large or dangerous creatures of the kai or aina appeared to  person, it was regarded as an encounter with one's ancestor, who was trying to tell you something significant to your life, a message from the other world of guardian spirits. I mentioned sharks, turtles, owls, manta rays, the poisonous black spiny sea urchin (wana), and so forth. As we were coming back out, we met a stranger in this very remote place, some fellow from colorado, and he pointed out to us a seal which was sunning itself on the rocks below the cliff. This was a 350 lb (or so) male (very erect penis) hawaiian monk seal, an endangered species of which there are only about 1100 left (and declining 4% per year despite human efforts). In thirty two years in hawaii nei I have only seen two others. It was my friend's first seal sighting. And seeing a stranger there was almost as rare, especially one so touristy, in such a place. Without him we would surely have missed it (how many have we missed?).

   So...was it a message and what was the message? It was a very fat, very erect seal. My friend thought I was prophetic. To me it was just another day at the beach.


terry 

solipsism is moot if there is no self...and there is no self according to orthodox buddhist doctrine...

without equivocation, there is nothing you can perceive or imagine that is not your self...it is in dealing with this fact that the subject of god comes up...

as a philosophical term, god = being... all things and everything have existence in common, and cannot be separated from it...the quran states, "god says 'be,' and it is"... "god" as a term is a symbol used, like a zero in mathematics, to stand in for the nameless void out of which all words (and all of existence) spring...it is easy to get caught up in what words mean when you don't know what they mean...

t



from "the glance" rumi/barks




FIERCE COURTESY


The connection to the Friend 
is secret and very fragile.

The image of that friendship
is in how you love, the grace

and delicacy, the subtle talking
together, in full prostration,

outside of time. When you're
there, remember the fierce

courtesy of the one with you.

you are way off the mark...

"boilis down to in terms of direct experience" and "translate in terms of ordinary stuff" are traps for the unwary...

translate your direct experiencing and ordinary stuff into the mystic...

t

[quote=Bored Vacuum

]BTW. I do not teach. I have people for that.



LOL

t


There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

Friedrich Nietzsche

yes

clinging = habit

imagine being free of habit...

t

[quote=Todo



]All this to say that I come back with a question that has been floating in my head recently:

Since meta-cognition, sort of inherently involves some degree of duality, how does one check the absence of said duality






the act of "checking" creates duality...

trust the universe like a baby trusts its nurse...

t

aloha dan,

   The nature of the word or concept of "thought" is dualistic; the actual reality is not. 

   Thought, speech, action, control - taken separately they are dualistic. Taken altogether, they are not.

   Thus, "the nature of thought," is the nature of all things, the tao.

   Whether one notes a thought dualistically or notes a sensation dualistically seems a pointless distinction. How is "noting" not reinforcing the experiencer, the ego? The noter. And who is being exhorted to "work"? What effort avails? Are these questions "illegitimate"?
   
terry



from "what is called thinking" by heidegger, p13

The matter of thinking is always confounding - all the more in proportion as we keep clear of prejudice. To keep clear of 
prejudice, we must be ready and willing to listen. Such readiness allows us to surmount the boundaries in which all customary
views are confined, and to reach a more open territory.

sure...

Hey Matthew,

Great working definition of god. This probably is where the concept came from in the beginning. Some individuals being more attuned to their unconscious had visions, dreams  and sometimes recived commands from what seemed to be a higher power. These became the prophets. Some of them were very charismatic and attracted other talented individuals who further fleshed the teachings of the prophet. Kings quickly understood how to consolidate their power by associating themselves with the incipient clergy. Ordinary people sensing there is more to their existence than the conscious mind and fearful of their mortality accepted the 'god' proposition.

My personal take on the question at this stage of my development is that:
1. The concept is probably useful for many people to live a bearable life (a life with less suffering, your case) .
2. The concept has historically led to, and unfortunately still does lead to, a lot of suffering.
3.  From an insight perspective, the concept is useless (like all concepts) although what it points to is real. In fact the only reality. In this regard the label is not important. One could apply many other labels: Love, Tao, Ground zero, The source... My favorite right now is none of them as I am switching to "pre-conceptual mode".