Author Topic: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences  (Read 1681 times)

rgardner

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #30 on: December 15, 2014, 04:05:55 pm »
Wow A/S/L :o

You are churning up a lot of "old" posts I have never seen (I am a latent newbie).

Glad to respond:

Had a very mellow "trip" with chocolate mescaline (peyote) - Jan. 1970, Oahu, Hawaii.

Sitting on a park bench in Waikiki around 4 AM, gazing out at the incoming surf.  Only the white caps were visible, correlated with the whooossshhh as the wave broke. 

A pressing thought in my mind was, "Who and what am I?" 

I bonded with what I now refer to as "Omega", the "oneness".  Like a total joyous release of all societal bondage.  Complete to:  "I am an animal, grateful for life." -> "What do I need to survive?"

..And had to build multiple ego's (A few did not work out) to eventually survive in society.

You asked..... ;)



J?

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #31 on: December 15, 2014, 04:08:24 pm »
Need some advice...
Jed please show me some hints... really need to start navigating...

SplashArtist

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #32 on: December 15, 2014, 04:13:09 pm »
Great post Jed, this would have been helpful to me awhile ago. Very important to see through even the most 'enlightening' peak experience. No need to chase the enlightenment carrot either, you'll never catch it. You WILL get tired of running though. HA!
Cheers everyone!

Matt Ricks

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #33 on: December 15, 2014, 04:20:05 pm »
Good subject, one of my obstacles. You even called me bliss ninny after my first post, nice observation  ;). I had years of almost daily spiritual experiences of all kinds (following various of esoteric techniques to initiate them). When they dissappeared I had dark nights of longing and feeling empty without them. I understood eventually that they will not produce T/R and lost the motivation to restore them with efforts, but the desire to have them has not disappeared.
Questions that are hard to see through - is there REALLY no enjoyER? the spiritual state is sure known, but is it known to something which cannot enjoy or feel desire at all? Is desire a story? So far from the regular view, that resistence shows up (hinting that it's BS, and the trinity seer-seen-seeing pointed by Gurus is just a play with words). Is spiritual experience REALLY not better than sitting in the toilet? good/bad must be for someone. But everything is divided to good/bad, so how would I ever see through this huge division? Is bliss ONLY an empty label (thought and sensations)? Why does "divinity" feeling seem to be richer than a thought?
This is mind blowing, and there are many doubts too...

Jed McKenna

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #34 on: December 16, 2014, 02:01:50 am »
Dear Matt:

Nothing is better than anything else. Seer, seeing and seen is not the way it is, there is only perceiving with no you in the picture.

Desire is the thought that one part of the dream is better than another, ain't so. A dream is a dream.

Sitting on the toilet can be entertaining. There is no good or bad, you create all that in your little head, usually you make up a pretty miserable story. Why? It's not you making it up, it's Maya/ego and she demands constant drama, real or imagined doesn't matter.

Love ya, Jed.






Der Steppenwolf

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #35 on: December 17, 2014, 07:52:26 pm »
This one got me thinking, so I figured I would throw this out there.

My big experience happened when I was 25.  I had been chasing the Enlightenment thing pretty hard via Alan Watts and other Zen cats.  I was still in school studying Philosophy so I basically had all day to rip ideas apart searching for the basic Truth.

One day, my girlfriend blew me off for a date that I was planning and I was totally convinced that she was cheating on me.  I drove back to my apartment and ended up lying on the bathroom floor crying so hard that a pool of snot and tears formed under my head.  I wasn't so much suicidal as suicide was a forgone conclusion, it was just when it would happen that was in question.  I just cried until I had nothing left and passed out.

Anyways, I woke up the next day with absolutely no energy and grabbed my headphones and laid down on the floor.  What happened next is really hard to describe, but for the first time I completely gave up on everything and was just me.  At first I was pure rage, then I cried alot.  Then I thought of how much I loved my little sister and these waves of Love started building in me.  It became quite overwhelming at one point.

Then my attention was drawn to different points in my body and I started feeling these knots start to untie themselves (best way of describing it: I just allowed my attention to flow to various points in my body and sooner or later something would release).  I then put my attention on the feeling of "I" and tried to find it...and I couldn't.  That realization was like getting hit with a wrecking ball.  I didn't know what I was.

That discovery blew the door off the experience.  I then started spontaneously understanding or "knowing things": how the ego was fictional, how the mind was purely a tool and always partially wrong, that everyone was chasing love no matter what they were doing, that I was not a human but consciousness, that it was impossible to die.  I knew that I was now awake in a way I had never been before and was shocked that it was so simple and that everyone was missing it.

It was at this point that a --and this is the only way I can describe it-- a whirlpool opened up in the middle of my abdomen and sucked me inside out through myself it to Pure, Peaceful, Emptiness...which was me.  I expanded backwards until the experience of the earth was just a speck of dust.  I was just the emptiness/consciousness that is I am. 

Then I came back to my body, my story, etc.  I then spent the next 3 years building an obnoxious dip-s-h-i-t of a character as the "Mystic" who had achieved Enlightenment in the past and was only waiting for the full event.  I grew long hair and wore beads.  And I chased that experience like heroin.  Drugs were the closest that I got, but they were unreliable and hard to come by.

To this day I have no idea what happened.  Was it a mystical experience? was it a seeing of Truth? 
But I still chase that experience everyday.
« Last Edit: December 18, 2014, 11:07:08 am by Jack »

jonnydas

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #36 on: December 17, 2014, 08:15:20 pm »
>P.S I am aware of the challenging work many of you are doing and I do appreciate it. I know it's seldom easy, can be, but not usually.

Hi Jed,

You say, '...it's seldom easy, can be, but not usually.'

So under what circumstances can it be easy? Curious.

Thanks.

Jon

Zoe Chen

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #37 on: December 17, 2014, 08:50:26 pm »
Wow, this is a big hit to me!

you said, Reality... there is no you and that imaginary you didn't have it, it happened, and that importance was just an act of illusory ego.....

i just realized how powerful the maya could weave all kind of illusion around me, if i have a "I" being there!?

p.s. it feels so released by dropping all that beautiful experience i had, OMG, how am i so stupid to even carry those beautiful burden all the time... :o  thanks Jed

Jed McKenna

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #38 on: December 17, 2014, 10:26:54 pm »
Dear Z:

Good work.

and Jon:

It's easiest when you haven't attached a great deal of importance to it, or anything.

Love ya, Jed.

Cannonball

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #39 on: December 19, 2014, 01:36:00 pm »
It's a funny thing..

I think for your own path to T/R experiences are just that. They happen, you reflect on them and you let them go. Clinging to them only holds you back from progress.

However if you want to communicate with others your personal experience is all you really have. You speak from YOUR experience. Anyone elses is second hand and only valuable for reference.

Jed McKenna

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #40 on: December 19, 2014, 01:36:58 pm »
 ;D

Matt Ricks

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #41 on: December 20, 2014, 03:34:10 am »
Hi Jed,

Thanks for your answer!

You wrote - "Nothing is better than anything else."  - that's the hardest for me to accept. When I inquire, layers of beliefs are peeled, until it gets to this wall of good/bad/desire. Many times it's in the form of "but those sensations are unpleasant". Seems like this is the basics.

Generally, I notice some progress over time towards less polarity of good and bad, but it seems quite far from truly seeing everything as equal.
There is always the desire to be in comfort conditions, anticipation towards what is labeled as "better experiences".

Do you have a creative suggestion or a practice how to see that clearly?
 

Jed McKenna

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #42 on: December 20, 2014, 06:13:44 am »
Look for who/what is naming something good or bad. Hint: it starts with 'I am..'.

Love ya, Jed.

know1

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #43 on: December 20, 2014, 08:05:04 am »
Jed's answers (like this one) bugged the hell out of me at first but what has become clearer is that even though he could give a clearer answer it still couldn't be THE answer, it would just approximate the experience of your own answer and would still be false.

It might placate the mind thats asking Jed the question but that is exactly the problem, if the mind is placated with a falsehood, no matter how succinctly Jed answers your question, your desire for truth will wain because the mind is satiated. The mind now "thinks" it has truth but the mind can never hold truth, period.

The answers he gives are an invitation to/for your mind to dig deeper, to find the "experience" of the answer, to do the math, which is your only true answer and the only thing that will shift you from a "thinking" paradigm to an "experiencing" paradigm.
« Last Edit: December 20, 2014, 08:25:59 am by know1 »

Jed McKenna

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Re: Jed rant on your spiritual experiences
« Reply #44 on: December 20, 2014, 08:25:53 am »
Here's a quote that I have included in the Nav Series from one of the great ones:

‘The dream is not your problem.
The problem is you like one part of the dream and not another.’
Nisargadatta.

Love ya, Jed.