psychoblast
Bluelighter
Growthspurt:
I think there are more extreme forms of vegetarianism (vegans?) who don't kill plants for food. They only eat foods that can be harvested without killing the plant (e.g., fruit from a tree but not a carrot). I don't know how that meshes with the idea of an annual vegetable that only lives one year, to harvest. It seems to me that harvesting such a vegetable would necessarily shorten its life by a tiny bit, but it wasn't supposed to live much longer anyway...I'm not sure how they view that.
Void:
I agree with most of what you say. I also see enlightenment as a form of ego death. I've characterized what I experienced (though possibly not in this thread) as a partial ego death. Because it was certainly not complete, but it was a taste of what it might be like. Which now leads me to contemplate whether I want to go further with it.
My concern is that maybe complete ego death is actually a mistake. To the extent anything can be a mistake. It is sort of like a form of suicide, and maybe we are not meant to move our ego forward to the next level while our body is still on this level. (I think maybe ego expansion a better term than ego death. I think of myself as expanding to think of "me" as the universe. In this way, to reject or hate any part of the universe would be to reject or hate myself. An offshoot, then, is that you come to accept and love the entire universe. Loss of your own life when your ego is expanded to the universal level is akin to what loss of one skin cell would be when your ego is at the individual human level. It is not a defeat, it is not elimination, it is not failure.)
I guess you could say I remain selfish, but my perception of myself expands to the universe. And selfishness on that level is pretty much unrecognizable.
But is this a good thing? I mean, it occurs to me that if I achieve complete ego death, then perhaps I am done with this world, done with this life. To go on living merely crowds out other living organisms that might be able to exist in the space I take up, or off the food I eat. Somehow I fear that complete ego death would be followed shortly by literal death. And the fact that I fear that, shows that I am obviously far short of such complete ego death (or ego expansion). I still have a strong part of my individual ego intact, fighting for survival.
If the entire human race was able to achieve complete enlightenment, ego death, would we then as a species commit suicide if we perceived that our extinction would promote more good for the universe than our continuation? In what way, then, is that a good philosophy? Perhaps it is a form of self-fulfilling, self-destructive brain-washing. Like recurssion for a computer program (when a computer program gets into a permanent loop and so essentially crashes). Maybe enlightenment is the human brain suffering recurssion. Crashing. Even if it is wisdom, maybe it is TOO MUCH wisdom.
One reason I came to my enlightened state was reflecting on the eventual extinction of humanity. I often analogize an individual human to our species, to all life, and then down the other way to one organ or one cell in a body. And so it occured to me that if, then, death is certain for the individual, so too extinction MUST be certain for the human species. And that led me to try expanding my ego outward beyond my species. But is that a valid thought process? Is extinction inevitable, or is that just a pessimism? A pessimism that led (indirectly) to a world-view that essentially made giving up on your own life (which could be viewed as suicide) okay?
I have a little experience with cults and I guess I am worried that just as I have seen group techniques designed to screw up my thinking, so too there may be individual techniques that sneakily do the same thing. How can you know the difference between enlightenment and believing you are enlightened when you are really just embracing a falsehood that feels like enlightenment?
So, anyway, I guess you could say that following my rush of enthusiasm for enlightenment, I am now trying to submit it to rational examination. To test its authenticity in whatever way I can think of. A lot of this stuff seems to build on and merge my prior posts, which makes me think that I sort of spiraled inward to enlightenment, brushing by it in many passes around the spiral before landing upon it. This examination, for example, is akin to my"what does certainty feel like" thread that I started even before I was even in this position of making that issue of more immediate concern.
Is this process of rational examination and skepticism merely the product of my individual ego trying to save itself, kicking and screaming for survival? Perhaps. It almost seems impossible that it could be anything else. The real issue, then, is whether the individual ego is worth saving.
I mean, if I love and accept all forms of life, I think I'd have to put my individual ego on that list. The subparts of my own personality can, themselves, be viewed as separate entities and destroying my materialism, for example, can be viewed as a form of killing. If my nonmaterialistic, altruistic self is so opposed to killing that it would sooner die than kill an animal, now can it then seek to survive within me if that means killing parts of myself?
This is where enlightenment comes in. I have grown, through my time on this board, to see that some philosophical questions necessarily turn into endless spirals where you can always step back one more level and turn everything you perceived as true on its head. And step back another level and do that again. And keep stepping back one level like that FOREVER. So it becomes impossible to ever find a definitive answer. This may be true for all philosophical questions. Perhaps for all questions. So linear scrutiny cannot get to an answer because it follows the path of the endless spiral.
Enlightenment, then, is the odd sense of teleporting to the center of the matter. Of getting to the final center point by removing yourself from hopeless, endless spiral path you were on. (Arguably, you have really just stepped back to a position where you are not part of the spiral but are perceiving the truth of the endless spiral. It should be noted that, while you may feel like now you know the absolute truth regarding that particular matter, because you perceive that whole spiral and can now see its center point, in fact, you have created a new spiral path that you are on by stepping back to your enlightened position, and you could take further steps on that new spiral pathway and perceive things differently each time you do. But let's ignore that for now, and take enlightenment one level at a time.)
Okay, now I'm forgetting where I am going with this. There are just too many tangents for now. At some point, I may try to write a complete analysis of my perception of enlightenment (a perception that will necessasrily be false if you are able to step back and view everything from one level further back than me).
It is like eating meat. If you do NOT view anything wrong with eating meat, and feel it as natural to the core of your being, then it IS natural and good for you to eat meat. This is true of the lion, the tiger and certain humans. If you view eating meat as a process that causes unnecessary pain to creatures with which you can empathize, all for some illusory need (i.e., humans do not NEED to eat meat to live, which makes it as much a luxury as a mink coat), then eating meat will make you feel guilty deep down and you would probably be relieved to finally get up the courage to buck the majority view and become vegetarian, or vegan. I ate meat all my life until now, and I'd say the last 15 years or so, I did it with the nagging feeling that doing so made me a worse person, made me soul sick in a way I tried to push down and distract myself from. So I put myself in the second category and hope to be happier not eating meat. But I don't try to sell other people on not eating meat. I simply try to sell people on accurately assessing whether they are in the first or second group above. Because if you are eating meat and you are in the second group, like I was, then I think you may be doing yourself an injury to your conscious by eating meat. See, it is not that I think eating meat is bad, it is that I think that compromising on your internal moral compass is bad.
I think a lot of people are pretending they are doing what they think is right, are trying to convince themselves that that is what they are doing, but they know deep down they are really just taking the safe and easy path of least resistance. And so our society becomes obsessively focused on creating toys to distract us from our guilt.
~psychoblast~
I think there are more extreme forms of vegetarianism (vegans?) who don't kill plants for food. They only eat foods that can be harvested without killing the plant (e.g., fruit from a tree but not a carrot). I don't know how that meshes with the idea of an annual vegetable that only lives one year, to harvest. It seems to me that harvesting such a vegetable would necessarily shorten its life by a tiny bit, but it wasn't supposed to live much longer anyway...I'm not sure how they view that.
Void:
I agree with most of what you say. I also see enlightenment as a form of ego death. I've characterized what I experienced (though possibly not in this thread) as a partial ego death. Because it was certainly not complete, but it was a taste of what it might be like. Which now leads me to contemplate whether I want to go further with it.
My concern is that maybe complete ego death is actually a mistake. To the extent anything can be a mistake. It is sort of like a form of suicide, and maybe we are not meant to move our ego forward to the next level while our body is still on this level. (I think maybe ego expansion a better term than ego death. I think of myself as expanding to think of "me" as the universe. In this way, to reject or hate any part of the universe would be to reject or hate myself. An offshoot, then, is that you come to accept and love the entire universe. Loss of your own life when your ego is expanded to the universal level is akin to what loss of one skin cell would be when your ego is at the individual human level. It is not a defeat, it is not elimination, it is not failure.)
I guess you could say I remain selfish, but my perception of myself expands to the universe. And selfishness on that level is pretty much unrecognizable.
But is this a good thing? I mean, it occurs to me that if I achieve complete ego death, then perhaps I am done with this world, done with this life. To go on living merely crowds out other living organisms that might be able to exist in the space I take up, or off the food I eat. Somehow I fear that complete ego death would be followed shortly by literal death. And the fact that I fear that, shows that I am obviously far short of such complete ego death (or ego expansion). I still have a strong part of my individual ego intact, fighting for survival.
If the entire human race was able to achieve complete enlightenment, ego death, would we then as a species commit suicide if we perceived that our extinction would promote more good for the universe than our continuation? In what way, then, is that a good philosophy? Perhaps it is a form of self-fulfilling, self-destructive brain-washing. Like recurssion for a computer program (when a computer program gets into a permanent loop and so essentially crashes). Maybe enlightenment is the human brain suffering recurssion. Crashing. Even if it is wisdom, maybe it is TOO MUCH wisdom.
One reason I came to my enlightened state was reflecting on the eventual extinction of humanity. I often analogize an individual human to our species, to all life, and then down the other way to one organ or one cell in a body. And so it occured to me that if, then, death is certain for the individual, so too extinction MUST be certain for the human species. And that led me to try expanding my ego outward beyond my species. But is that a valid thought process? Is extinction inevitable, or is that just a pessimism? A pessimism that led (indirectly) to a world-view that essentially made giving up on your own life (which could be viewed as suicide) okay?
I have a little experience with cults and I guess I am worried that just as I have seen group techniques designed to screw up my thinking, so too there may be individual techniques that sneakily do the same thing. How can you know the difference between enlightenment and believing you are enlightened when you are really just embracing a falsehood that feels like enlightenment?
So, anyway, I guess you could say that following my rush of enthusiasm for enlightenment, I am now trying to submit it to rational examination. To test its authenticity in whatever way I can think of. A lot of this stuff seems to build on and merge my prior posts, which makes me think that I sort of spiraled inward to enlightenment, brushing by it in many passes around the spiral before landing upon it. This examination, for example, is akin to my"what does certainty feel like" thread that I started even before I was even in this position of making that issue of more immediate concern.
Is this process of rational examination and skepticism merely the product of my individual ego trying to save itself, kicking and screaming for survival? Perhaps. It almost seems impossible that it could be anything else. The real issue, then, is whether the individual ego is worth saving.
I mean, if I love and accept all forms of life, I think I'd have to put my individual ego on that list. The subparts of my own personality can, themselves, be viewed as separate entities and destroying my materialism, for example, can be viewed as a form of killing. If my nonmaterialistic, altruistic self is so opposed to killing that it would sooner die than kill an animal, now can it then seek to survive within me if that means killing parts of myself?
This is where enlightenment comes in. I have grown, through my time on this board, to see that some philosophical questions necessarily turn into endless spirals where you can always step back one more level and turn everything you perceived as true on its head. And step back another level and do that again. And keep stepping back one level like that FOREVER. So it becomes impossible to ever find a definitive answer. This may be true for all philosophical questions. Perhaps for all questions. So linear scrutiny cannot get to an answer because it follows the path of the endless spiral.
Enlightenment, then, is the odd sense of teleporting to the center of the matter. Of getting to the final center point by removing yourself from hopeless, endless spiral path you were on. (Arguably, you have really just stepped back to a position where you are not part of the spiral but are perceiving the truth of the endless spiral. It should be noted that, while you may feel like now you know the absolute truth regarding that particular matter, because you perceive that whole spiral and can now see its center point, in fact, you have created a new spiral path that you are on by stepping back to your enlightened position, and you could take further steps on that new spiral pathway and perceive things differently each time you do. But let's ignore that for now, and take enlightenment one level at a time.)
Okay, now I'm forgetting where I am going with this. There are just too many tangents for now. At some point, I may try to write a complete analysis of my perception of enlightenment (a perception that will necessasrily be false if you are able to step back and view everything from one level further back than me).
It is like eating meat. If you do NOT view anything wrong with eating meat, and feel it as natural to the core of your being, then it IS natural and good for you to eat meat. This is true of the lion, the tiger and certain humans. If you view eating meat as a process that causes unnecessary pain to creatures with which you can empathize, all for some illusory need (i.e., humans do not NEED to eat meat to live, which makes it as much a luxury as a mink coat), then eating meat will make you feel guilty deep down and you would probably be relieved to finally get up the courage to buck the majority view and become vegetarian, or vegan. I ate meat all my life until now, and I'd say the last 15 years or so, I did it with the nagging feeling that doing so made me a worse person, made me soul sick in a way I tried to push down and distract myself from. So I put myself in the second category and hope to be happier not eating meat. But I don't try to sell other people on not eating meat. I simply try to sell people on accurately assessing whether they are in the first or second group above. Because if you are eating meat and you are in the second group, like I was, then I think you may be doing yourself an injury to your conscious by eating meat. See, it is not that I think eating meat is bad, it is that I think that compromising on your internal moral compass is bad.
I think a lot of people are pretending they are doing what they think is right, are trying to convince themselves that that is what they are doing, but they know deep down they are really just taking the safe and easy path of least resistance. And so our society becomes obsessively focused on creating toys to distract us from our guilt.
~psychoblast~
dropped them in favor of a long-term meditative practice to work through this "identification" I had. I don't see why there would be nothing left in this life if enlightenment were achieved. You still have the same preferences and the same life to live. You just don't have any junky memes like "I am this body, I will die at death" distracting you. As for the issue of killing something by working through this identity, I don't see it that way at all - things are always changing, in the future you will be one way or another, and you are choosing how that is going to be. You are a constant mass of birth, death, and change just the same as you are the boundless infinite, and facing that and realizing you don't have to fear it is a massive relief. The infinite has no special love for individuation and no special regret when it recedes. Things are the way they are.
