I have a memory of a time when I was maybe three or four years old. The memory itself is fuzzy; all I remember is standing in the living room of my home. That’s it.
But at some point I remembered that this was the oldest memory I could remember. I remembered that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get around the fact that in my subjective experience I have always been. I have objective data telling me that at some point I wasn’t (i.e. before birth). But as a subject I have no recollection of a time when I was not. It is not conceivable that I was not or that I won’t be. I understand that the fact of the matter is that I was born and that I will die. Those are the facts. But the subjective reality of my existence informs me that I have always been. Whether I will always be I cannot say/feel. But that I have always been is an intensity of feeling that no objective fact can take away from. Does anyone else feel this way? Do you know what I’m talking about?
How is life not eternal? How have I not always been even though I have facts to “prove” that “I” have not always been?
Our illusion that we have a mind is born out of fear. So we do not want the fear to come to an end, because the end of the fear is the end of the thought. If the thought comes to an end, you are dead. What is left after that is something the body does not know.
I don’t know if I’m quite following. I could see how the mind could be born out of fear as it relates to nothing but past/future, but when you say “when thought comes to an end you are dead” do you mean literally dead or…?
When my mind has been emptied for a moment and all that remains is that inexplainable experience of divine fullness/emptiness does that mean I’m “dead”?
, What is the thought “you”? Is it what memories you have? How you look like? The place you live? Th thoughts you have? Is it your education? After you erase all that is there still a you? If you let go (for a moment) all that, what’s left is a feeling. Maybe some fear,some love (given to you). That sense of you is what you bring with you
When approaching the end, that sense stays with you. Even logically that makes sense. That you is eternal. Otherwise how can you be born, and become you?
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But that you maybecome anyone, not necessarily you. It is everyone. There is no you, strictly speaking, before, during, or after. You are of the moment, an energy, a something, and if you can hold unto that, then you know who you are.
Its sovable, but only through a process of oscillating the conventional and this “sensed” reality.
I remember a time about 2-3 years ago when after a bad breakup I was writhing in emotional pain and just couldn’t bare it. I chose for a moment to not think about it and BOOM! I understood that all was alright. I understand that this little old “I” that needed this woman, and that needed in general was nothing. I awoke the next morning with this same feeling, and suddenly everything in existence felt different to me. The “I” was no longer in control. It was merely a fiction of the mind.The Self was overcome with feelings of love, sorrow, fear, and compassion. Sometimes I couldn’t make out exactly what energies I was overcome with as my understanding of language was diminishing and I just felt myself to be like a great, powerful ball of fire that was one with everything. I had never felt anything to be more “real” than this experience. My mind was just a dead machanism. This energy itself was what was real.
I don’t know if the type of experience I’m trying to communicate is what you are getting at? Almost all of my “attributes” were gone. It was just energy. “I” was just energy. I didn’t know how to handle it entirely and I started to freak out because I thought that I had actually died and that death was an illusion and… it’s so hard to try and communicate something like this. But at any rate, “it” was sublime. Whatever “it” was. “It” seemed to be more real than real. But I still just don’t know what the hell to make of it.
If it occurs through no volition of yours, then that is the end of it. You will have no way of stopping it, of changing the situation at all. You cannot but go through it. It does no good to question reality. Question, rather, your goals, your beliefs, and assumptions. It is from them, not reality, that you must be freed. The questions will disappear with the automatic abandonment of goals. They are interdependent. One can’t exist without the other.
Yes, Idiot,that’s the feeling. And then you just go with it, and answers are given, and there is a strength that somehow comes into you, and fear just goes. It needs a tremendous type of event that brings this on, usually of almost an insurmountable type, where absolutely no exit strategy is appearant, and the feeling is one of hopelessness and entrapment. And suddenly, there it is: a clear understanding. And it’s very difficult to hold onto idiot is not a thought, but it is a kind of a feeling/thought. It’s a realisation that’s its OK. Thanks for sharing.
It is only thought that can identify an experience as such; in the absence of thought identifying and recognizing we have no way of knowing that it is even an experience, let alone a spiritual experience of a certain kind.
I think , at death’s door, thought can not differentiate between life and death, and will not be able to know what state it’s in. My feeling is, that there is no difference, in accordance. It probably is of very finite duration(death), but of infinite duration as it approaches it’s event-horizon. I just feel, there is an analogy there to physical processes. Just a hunch.
The experience you’ve described here reminded me of an experience shared in a TED talk several years ago by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist who had the opportunity to study her own brain when she suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.
In her own words:
She goes on to describe those sensations in a way that made them sound wonderful and transcendent.
I’m not trying to suggest you had a stroke, I was just struck [no pun intended] by the similarity of your description to hers, and I find the physiology underlying our conscious experiences fascinating. It almost sounds like something was happening in the left hemisphere of your brain, and that it was a result of a conscious effort on your part (“I chose for a moment not to think about it…”), if that’s possible.
[If you have 19 minutes, I highly recommend having a listen, she’s an articulate, entertaining speaker who’s talk/lecture was captivating as well as, to me, informative.]
It’s thought and words which paint the image of the experience.
But it is the spirit or the soul (if we have one) or the core self which flows through the experience…which actually BECOME the experience.
The experience does not identify itself as a spiritual one - it’s just an experience of BEING in the moment…whether that moment lasts a second or five minutes.
i have been to the point of where the self springs . and the imagination is the imaginer.
Experiences create it and it creates the experiences . memories are not of what actually happened. memories are what we are capable of understanding or what we grasp . memories make us and we make the memories. memories might very well not be true. the self is created from what might be true or not be true. and as it is created ; it can be deconstructed. It can be unthought to realze that it is not an actual entity but thought itself. upon self realization then this infantomable nowhere is us.
You were never born but manifested when the circumstances were such. Any other such and another self appears. you have never lived ever before. but only till now that the circumstance are such. And you will not exist again again untill those circumstance are just such.
Life
is
a
dream
