Truly unique approach. Penetrating. Undermining conventional beliefs. Returning to basic perception, sensation. Unraveling a lot of false beliefs. Greg is a great teacher.
The concluding remark is spot on........that which perceives NEVER comes and goes unlike the perceived objects themselves. It's just changeless awareness. And so if you said, for instance, "I hear the dog barking outside whereas I'm here", THAT is simply the mind making a comment on location differences.
Difference between subject and object feels to me like the difference between touching my own arm and touching someone else's. The first I can feel both. The second I only feel my touch not the being touched.
Greg is methodical and analyzes his environment deliberately with awareness. His books are cutting edge in the understanding of non duality. He uses Vedanta Awareness teachings and Buddhist Emptiness teachings with equal aplomb. Google Chandrakirti and Greg Goode and you may just find out something (speaking conventionally) about a chariot and you may find the Secret to the nature of consciousness. Becoming liberated from the "idea" that you are the body makes it more acceptable to lose it.
Once you forget all concepts, limitless nature of self will show itself more and more, abilities to shut doors might come about, they are called siddhis in the east. But real liberation is when you can be totally fearless without having any siddhis, as they also come and go.
But without the body, the "physical" body, can the seeing occur? The light of the bulb is not the bulb itself. The light is not an object, has no boundary, and yet if you remove the bulb, the light is gone too.
This reminds me of what Rupert Spira mentions frequently (and of course all the others too, but he does it often). But im still asking why do we seem to be able to move an arm, for example, but not a door, my rooms door for example?? Why do we have control only of one body, whats it all about? Or should i leave it as a mystery of life and be done with it? Cause that could be proof of our limitled nature of the Self (hope not).
The self identifies with just the body/mind and is therefore limited. As in any dream. What you really are is the limitless Self but you need to awaken in order to realize it. As with any dream.
I agree with what you said, the thing is, i havent heard any Advaita guy saying that awareness is seated in the brain. You know? And that also brings the question, what does "seated" means when talking about awareness? I know, im probably bein a pain in the ass with these questions. Sorry. :)
No, I agree, they are not saying that Awareness is seated in the brain. The understanding is that Awareness is what our true nature is, and also is in everything that exists, so in terms of the Tantric understanding we are both, we are everything. The brain is within that Awareness, not just an object in it. (ha ha ha .........I can't get my 'head' around it either!
@tan1772 There is no physical body, what we call the body is sensations and visual stimuli, and if you break it down more seeing and sensations are not two, they are the same. So seeing does not need a body, nor does a body exist, the body or brain rather most likely is filtering experience so that it makes sense instead of just some crazy light show or disorder (chaos).. the word cosmos from chaos.
Every night before you go to bed work on an experiment: tell yourself you will remember your dreams as soon as you wake up write down what you remember. I think you will be surprised at how much you remember. Over time you may even wake up and it will be a while before the I-ness leaves.
Thought we speak of objects, All objects do not come about equally. That object on which attention is focused comes across more clearly. For example when you are listening to someone, his voice comes across more vividly than the sound of traffic. But then you can move the attention from his sound to, lets say, a feeling in your body. But can one grasp attention itself ? So how does one understand attention in this enquiry, Just like awareness, attention cannot be grasped though it roams here and there. You can't release attention entirely from all objects (except in deep sleep of course). Attention is a very useful thing to explore during our self enquiry.
Rupert Spira suggests that attention is designed for perception of objects and that it is a contraction that must be relaxed in order to return awareness to itself. This process of relaxing attention may be called meditation.
Thank you Alacer. What I have seen is that there is actually nothing called attention. It is just a subtle thought - Some sort of preparedness of the mind to spew active thoughts on some aspect of the moment that just passed by. There is always a small gap between the moment that object of interest occurred and the attention is drawn on that. I think this is what the practitioners of vipassana call Chitakanna. It is too fast and it feels like happening in present moment. But there is always a distance between attention and the object that it is on. It is only a thought. And that creates the sense of continousness of life. In fact thought itself just such an occurrence, only the next thought clarifies and understands and gives gravitas to the thought that occurred and it just continues.
Deep sleep is the ONE and only mental hurdle that I cannot get past with all this. Those who say death is like deep sleep. Well, first of all, how can anyone possibly say that awareness is present in deep sleep? To me, it sounds like just wishful thinking to make the whole theory gel. As for death being like deep sleep...that sounds 100% the same as non-existence. Awareness with no conscious apprehension...is 100% indistinguishable from total annihilation. If that's death...what ISN'T to fear?
What you say here about deep sleep and whether it truly equates to 'no death' has occurred to me also. I mean if I am not aware (in the same sense as being AWARENESS when I am awake in the daytime) in deep sleep, then how can that be said to demonstrate that the 'I AM' lives eternally in a similar way? And in the daylight hours I am 'aware', but I also have the senses in the body to be 'aware', and if my body is no longer, as in death, that how can I be 'aware' (as I have no senses, as you say, to apprehend anything?
Yes, only seeing what "appears" to be the body when you see it or touch it(or even taste or smell it for that matter) will tell one that this so called body exists as an object in Awareness.
You do only you can't announce yourself during deep sleep because you have no body. Only upon waking can you announce that you were aware during deep sleep. Take the analogy of a pearl diver diving to the bottom of ocean to find a pearl. Once he dives to bottom and experiences the pearl (deep sleep) he can't announce to the people on the shore that he is experiencing the pearl while in bottom of ocean. Only when he rises to surface (waking) can be say that he experienced the pearl. Similarly during deep sleep you wouldn't need to announce that you are aware because it's only you there. So who else would be there to announce to that I exist. Only awareness exist. The ego then says I wasn't aware during deep sleep because the ego is absent there so it says deep sleep is nothing.
Read a novel that incorporates direct path teaching in it! www.amazon.com/dp/B079KWFCF8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517796785&sr=8-1&keywords=saturnalia+minetola
Chandrakirti invites us to examine the Chariot. If the chariot contains "inherent existence" the chariot must be found in it's parts. Can the chariot be found in it's wheels? NO Can the chariot be found in it's axles. NO........and so on and so on. So we have isolated any possibility that the chariot could be the same as it's parts. Then he says that the chariot cannot be different from it's parts. Well no parts, no chariot, so the chariot cannot be different from it's parts. Get it?
So, shifting that analogy across to me, the body, me the person, I don't exist at all. Hence everything is nothing and nothing is everything. What remains is the context in which the thing(s) arose/arises. THAT, I suppose could be likened to awareness --also it is OUT of awareness that the bits and the thing emerged.... So the only REAL is potentiality, and the energy of that in the thing that was born. Take away the thing, and the Potential remains, i.e. the SELF, that which is eternal. Everything else is............. Pff!!
I think trying to explain advaita with a rational/scientific approach is an error. Greg goode seems a very intelligent man but all the arguments he gave don't convince me at all. yet I've read Jean klein and his approach is more poetic, the idea is that the realisation is not something mental so there is no need to use the mental to understand it.
I love your videos btw. And nonduality fascinates me....but, this deep sleep issue haunts me. To say death is nothing to fear because awareness remains...it wasn't born and cannot die, etc. Yet, pure whole total awareness...WITHOUT conscious apprehension OF anything...is absolutely no different than annihilation. You can give them different names, but it's the same thing. Again...if that's death, then yes, I fear death. Timeless awareness...timeless unborn awareness conscious of nothing?
Dyanne Nesty Awareness is aware of itself. It knows only awareness. To know anything other than itself it has to focus its attention away from itself - knower and the known - subject and object, etc. This is where it forgets itself as Infinite whole and sees itself as finite. Seeing itself as separate. This is how Infinite consciousness experiences the world. It is through our finite minds that it does this. However, there is only awareness.
Yes, the body is an object. But I have subjective phenomenological evidence, due to constant body sensations, that I experience the world via this body. I think he confuses things in his long introduction to he punchline, that we really are the awareness. Some of these peoples identifying themselves with the notion of nonduality fall into, what I call, idealistic reductionism.
+nimim. Marko Mikkilä! i agree, he's description of the body not being there tramples over some contrary evidence [e.g. if i dream i fly i don't see my body but if i dream i'm bitten by a dog i do feel it... or when i walk i can't see my body- yes i can; i can't see most of my face and my back but there's parts i definitely see...]. However, in the end the body is just a sensation/thought. Can a sensation have sensations? i suggest that awareness means a shift of focus from the objects of experience [labeled by the mind] to the act of experiencing. This way the body and the world fall into the background and 'being' takes the front row.
I think the point Greg makes is that the body and certainly most of it is not necessarily perceived or felt constantly and sometimes it maybe completely absent. Using advaitic logic that means its not real, whereas awareness must be constant, since there can't be any direct evidence when it's absent. Obviously that's a very weak argument from an ordinary viewpoint, since we are usually willing to accept indirect evidence.
This is great teaching from a great teacher. His books explore these themes in more depth, for those who are interested.
Truly unique approach. Penetrating. Undermining conventional beliefs. Returning to basic perception, sensation. Unraveling a lot of false beliefs. Greg is a great teacher.
yes, as his teacher Krishna Menon Atmananda! I have 3 of Atmanandas books and they are so very potent, its wonderful~
Sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don't.
The concluding remark is spot on........that which perceives NEVER comes and goes unlike the perceived objects themselves. It's just changeless awareness. And so if you said, for instance, "I hear the dog barking outside whereas I'm here", THAT is simply the mind making a comment on location differences.
You have to become totally liberated from "mind" to stop being afraid of losing your mind.
Difference between subject and object feels to me like the difference between touching my own arm and touching someone else's. The first I can feel both. The second I only feel my touch not the being touched.
Finally! A fresh perspective on this.
I realized that i am an experience. Who i am is an experience.. in consciousness
Greg is methodical and analyzes his environment deliberately with awareness. His books are cutting edge in the understanding of non duality. He uses Vedanta Awareness teachings and Buddhist Emptiness teachings with equal aplomb. Google Chandrakirti and Greg Goode and you may just find out something (speaking conventionally) about a chariot and you may find the Secret to the nature of consciousness. Becoming liberated from the "idea" that you are the body makes it more acceptable to lose it.
Once you forget all concepts, limitless nature of self will show itself more and more, abilities to shut doors might come about, they are called siddhis in the east. But real liberation is when you can be totally fearless without having any siddhis, as they also come and go.
But without the body, the "physical" body, can the seeing occur? The light of the bulb is not the bulb itself. The light is not an object, has no boundary, and yet if you remove the bulb, the light is gone too.
Very Douglas Harding, the headless guy.
Its great..
You are "experiencing" non experience. The Void. Nothingness. But you are here now.
This reminds me of what Rupert Spira mentions frequently (and of course all the others too, but he does it often). But im still asking why do we seem to be able to move an arm, for example, but not a door, my rooms door for example?? Why do we have control only of one body, whats it all about? Or should i leave it as a mystery of life and be done with it? Cause that could be proof of our limitled nature of the Self (hope not).
The self identifies with just the body/mind and is therefore limited. As in any dream. What you really are is the limitless Self but you need to awaken in order to realize it. As with any dream.
💐🙏
I agree with what you said, the thing is, i havent heard any Advaita guy saying that awareness is seated in the brain. You know? And that also brings the question, what does "seated" means when talking about awareness? I know, im probably bein a pain in the ass with these questions. Sorry. :)
No, I agree, they are not saying that Awareness is seated in the brain. The understanding is that Awareness is what our true nature is, and also is in everything that exists, so in terms of the Tantric understanding we are both, we are everything. The brain is within that Awareness, not just an object in it. (ha ha ha .........I can't get my 'head' around it either!
I am that to which the body, or anything else for that matter, appears
Do you include Greg on your "spiritual folks"? I dont get which side you are on... :S
Bodily organization of the nerves and cells and stuff could be an answer but im still not so sure it answers it totally.
@tan1772 There is no physical body, what we call the body is sensations and visual stimuli, and if you break it down more seeing and sensations are not two, they are the same. So seeing does not need a body, nor does a body exist, the body or brain rather most likely is filtering experience so that it makes sense instead of just some crazy light show or disorder (chaos).. the word cosmos from chaos.
I’ve always tended over the last thirty years to listen to those who make no money from their teachings
Every night before you go to bed work on an experiment: tell yourself you will remember your dreams as soon as you wake up write down what you remember. I think you will be surprised at how much you remember. Over time you may even wake up and it will be a while before the I-ness leaves.
Thought we speak of objects, All objects do not come about equally. That object on which attention is focused comes across more clearly. For example when you are listening to someone, his voice comes across more vividly than the sound of traffic. But then you can move the attention from his sound to, lets say, a feeling in your body. But can one grasp attention itself ? So how does one understand attention in this enquiry, Just like awareness, attention cannot be grasped though it roams here and there. You can't release attention entirely from all objects (except in deep sleep of course). Attention is a very useful thing to explore during our self enquiry.
Rupert Spira suggests that attention is designed for perception of objects and that it is a contraction that must be relaxed in order to return awareness to itself.
This process of relaxing attention may be called meditation.
Thank you Alacer. What I have seen is that there is actually nothing called attention. It is just a subtle thought - Some sort of preparedness of the mind to spew active thoughts on some aspect of the moment that just passed by. There is always a small gap between the moment that object of interest occurred and the attention is drawn on that. I think this is what the practitioners of vipassana call Chitakanna. It is too fast and it feels like happening in present moment. But there is always a distance between attention and the object that it is on. It is only a thought. And that creates the sense of continousness of life. In fact thought itself just such an occurrence, only the next thought clarifies and understands and gives gravitas to the thought that occurred and it just continues.
Deep sleep is the ONE and only mental hurdle that I cannot get past with all this. Those who say death is like deep sleep. Well, first of all, how can anyone possibly say that awareness is present in deep sleep? To me, it sounds like just wishful thinking to make the whole theory gel. As for death being like deep sleep...that sounds 100% the same as non-existence. Awareness with no conscious apprehension...is 100% indistinguishable from total annihilation. If that's death...what ISN'T to fear?
What you say here about deep sleep and whether it truly equates to 'no death' has occurred to me also. I mean if I am not aware (in the same sense as being AWARENESS when I am awake in the daytime) in deep sleep, then how can that be said to demonstrate that the 'I AM' lives eternally in a similar way? And in the daylight hours I am 'aware', but I also have the senses in the body to be 'aware', and if my body is no longer, as in death, that how can I be 'aware' (as I have no senses, as you say, to apprehend anything?
I tend to agree, that part of the Vedanta shtick strikes me as a fairytale as well. But there's still a baby in all this bathwater of assertions.
I experienced awareness in deep sleep once upon a time. Deep sleep is not an absence of awareness, but an awareness of absence.
Yes, only seeing what "appears" to be the body when you see it or touch it(or even taste or smell it for that matter) will tell one that this so called body exists as an object in Awareness.
I sure don't experience I-ness during deep dreamless sleep? Anyone else who do?
You do only you can't announce yourself during deep sleep because you have no body. Only upon waking can you announce that you were aware during deep sleep.
Take the analogy of a pearl diver diving to the bottom of ocean to find a pearl. Once he dives to bottom and experiences the pearl (deep sleep) he can't announce to the people on the shore that he is experiencing the pearl while in bottom of ocean. Only when he rises to surface (waking) can be say that he experienced the pearl.
Similarly during deep sleep you wouldn't need to announce that you are aware because it's only you there. So who else would be there to announce to that I exist. Only awareness exist.
The ego then says I wasn't aware during deep sleep because the ego is absent there so it says deep sleep is nothing.
Fundamental technique of Ramana Maharishi
how did you know you were asleep?
Read a novel that incorporates direct path teaching in it! www.amazon.com/dp/B079KWFCF8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517796785&sr=8-1&keywords=saturnalia+minetola
Chandrakirti invites us to examine the Chariot. If the chariot contains "inherent existence" the chariot must be found in it's parts. Can the chariot be found in it's wheels? NO Can the chariot be found in it's axles. NO........and so on and so on. So we have isolated any possibility that the chariot could be the same as it's parts. Then he says that the chariot cannot be different from it's parts. Well no parts, no chariot, so the chariot cannot be different from it's parts. Get it?
So, shifting that analogy across to me, the body, me the person, I don't exist at all. Hence everything is nothing and nothing is everything. What remains is the context in which the thing(s) arose/arises. THAT, I suppose could be likened to awareness --also it is OUT of awareness that the bits and the thing emerged.... So the only REAL is potentiality, and the energy of that in the thing that was born. Take away the thing, and the Potential remains, i.e. the SELF, that which is eternal. Everything else is............. Pff!!
I think trying to explain advaita with a rational/scientific approach is an error. Greg goode seems a very intelligent man but all the arguments he gave don't convince me at all. yet I've read Jean klein and his approach is more poetic, the idea is that the realisation is not something mental so there is no need to use the mental to understand it.
I love your videos btw. And nonduality fascinates me....but, this deep sleep issue haunts me. To say death is nothing to fear because awareness remains...it wasn't born and cannot die, etc. Yet, pure whole total awareness...WITHOUT conscious apprehension OF anything...is absolutely no different than annihilation. You can give them different names, but it's the same thing. Again...if that's death, then yes, I fear death. Timeless awareness...timeless unborn awareness conscious of nothing?
awareness is intrinsically always aware of itself by being itself
But without manifestation, is Awareness, Aware?
Dyanne Nesty Awareness is aware of itself. It knows only awareness. To know anything other than itself it has to focus its attention away from itself - knower and the known - subject and object, etc. This is where it forgets itself as Infinite whole and sees itself as finite. Seeing itself as separate. This is how Infinite consciousness experiences the world. It is through our finite minds that it does this. However, there is only awareness.
Yes, the body is an object. But I have subjective phenomenological evidence, due to constant body sensations, that I experience the world via this body. I think he confuses things in his long introduction to he punchline, that we really are the awareness. Some of these peoples identifying themselves with the notion of nonduality fall into, what I call, idealistic reductionism.
+nimim. Marko Mikkilä! i agree, he's description of the body not being there tramples over some contrary evidence [e.g. if i dream i fly i don't see my body but if i dream i'm bitten by a dog i do feel it... or when i walk i can't see my body- yes i can; i can't see most of my face and my back but there's parts i definitely see...]. However, in the end the body is just a sensation/thought. Can a sensation have sensations? i suggest that awareness means a shift of focus from the objects of experience [labeled by the mind] to the act of experiencing. This way the body and the world fall into the background and 'being' takes the front row.
Yes.
I think the point Greg makes is that the body and certainly most of it is not necessarily perceived or felt constantly and sometimes it maybe completely absent. Using advaitic logic that means its not real, whereas awareness must be constant, since there can't be any direct evidence when it's absent. Obviously that's a very weak argument from an ordinary viewpoint, since we are usually willing to accept indirect evidence.
You cannot be a subject of your experience. Otherwise you should legitimately say you are a book. Your body is experienced in the same way.
You cannot be a subject of your experience since there is no you, and no me as well. Now (in the "end") it's all one (not two).
Timeless awareness...timeless unborn awareness conscious of nothing?
well the enlightened sages say that can happen before death!
Does not know if puffed or stuffed.
fucking music lol