Hi Sounder..for the record, the real purpose of religious teaching, despite it having little traction among most of the human religious institutions of the world, is to prepare and guide willing and worthy souls to realize a state of non-material existence in the here and now, not in any conceptual future.
I find notions of worthiness to be closely connected to unfounded egoistic pretenses.
And yes, I have closely watched the process unfold among several 'gifted' friends and acquaintances.
That worthiness business also strikes me as being a bit Patriarchal and approval seeking.
So best not harbour the erroneous conceptual understanding that enlightenment implies the potential to interfere materially for the good, in the ongoing evolutionary progress and drama of the affairs of mankind.
First off, try, try, try to not speak down to me by suggesting that my understanding of these matters is merely conceptual.
I find your use of language and the conceptual baggage it carries to be interesting.
While I don’t think much about enlightenment, still the realization events in my life have provided a very useful method for improving my relationships and integration with my surrounding and experience.
My thinking starts with a few working assumptions with a primary one being that the spiritual and the material are the same thing.
Next I consider that if one has more accurate information regarding the nature of reality and ones relationship to said reality, then one is potentially able to make better decisions and hence live a better life.
I also think that there is no essential or autonomous I, and that reality is expressed on a continuum rather than as separated ‘realms’ of existence that (are made to) seem to be at perpetual war with each other.
Because I feel we ‘create’ each other and our relationship to reality through our various modes of interaction, it follows that improving modes of interaction can improve ones overall life.
For me, this involves ongoing ‘training’ techniques to ameliorate for certain shortcomings of personality.
So I work on tonal control and articulation in order to internalize the idea that what I ‘get’ is a reflection of what I put out.
This may be why Sounder was picked as my intertubes name.
The methods formulated via results of (long time ago) ‘realization’ experiences, more like revelations of the depth of my ignorance than like the ‘enlightenment’ experiences that some describe, have over time provided tools that grace my life and experience with more beauty, wonder and depth than I could begin to imagine when I first asked the question as a child; But how can it be that anything can be anything at all?
Which is to say; my life is very blessed.
For this, basically all I do is aspire to balance order/liberty in my activities.
In modern terms you might say I do what I need to do so that when I’m doing what I want to do, I’m not distracted by a niggling feeling that I should be doing something different than the thing I find myself doing at that moment.
The method might be a form of Vipassana in that critical self examination is needed to see how well balance is maintained.
Heaven and Earth, like good and evil, are complementary opposite concepts, so let us not have any oxymoronic hopes, the wise don't don't eat of the fruit of such trees.
If—then, If these things are ‘complementary opposite concepts’ (née social conditioning), then I am a moron and not real ‘wise’ to ‘dabble’ in such base and misguided pursuits. How about if these things are mere crude words that are archaic, if not to say feudalistic impositions upon our categories of thought? What then?
And likewise, a real Guru, unlike the legions in the market place who pretend to be so, only teach about the necessity of leaving the material realms for the realization of liberation from ignorance and suffering.
Yeah, that’s kind of my beef with ‘real’ Guru’s. Seems to me like if you gotta leave the ‘material’ realm in order to be ‘liberated’ from ignorance and suffering, then one has a perfect built in excuse for acting like a total putz even while claiming adept status and deep understanding of reality.
That’s been my experience and observation at any rate.
Moreover, such a Guru would point out that they themselves are not the real Guru, but that the real Guru is within and the student must realize that Guru in order to realize cosmic evolutionary graduation from the Kingdom of Man.
They can say whatever they want; I’m more interested in what they do. I find it a bit hubristic for some little pinprick of consciousness from amidst the vast ocean of consciousness, to think that one localized expression, an ‘I’ that the same folk claim has no essential existence, thinks that it is a proper candidate for ‘graduation from the Kingdom of Man'.
So fellow travellers all at RI, if the above does not conceptually resonate with you, do not give it a another thought, for in fact it is no more meaningful than for those whom it does resonate, for the truth is not in words...only by realization...
Are you suggesting that resonance has no bearing on or relationship to meaning and/or its productions? Cause that just sounds odd.
fuckin ‘concepts’ (snigger) First they’re bad, then they’re good, fancy that.
It seems like an odd truth to be one with no application or ‘potential to interfere materially for the good’.
That's a Dualist for ya.