[Gem]

Originally Posted by Jyotir

Extracting and addressing this point:

Agreed, and so true Gem. How could it be otherwise?
And yet... at the same time, and by virtue of the same premise - that is rather the entire dilemma, the crux of the matter, the whole problem of human existence right there.

Who is this “you” so named?
By what means of cognition is this identity known?
Does this ‘you’ change, and if so, how so?

The deeper sense of the reference 'you' can't be regarded as changing, progressing, developing and so forth. But this doesn't negate in the least the way insight is transformative of the mind, in which sense, not so much changes as it fundamentally transforms a person.

To me this has to do with the truthful expression of self, and now I'm referring to 'self' as the changeless, and this expression is metta as one is moved by the outpouring love which characterises the changeless.

It's just that the one we call Gem isn't an agent, who by any will of his own, determines such expression, but may be regarded as the vessel or channel through which 'self' can be expressed.

Can a human being seek to deliberately effect any concentration or acceleration of those means by an intelligent will intrinsic to human life toward that realization (i.e., devotion, discrimination, service, meditation, etc.)?

The meditation is a very subtle subject, and the path of it is non-volitional. This makes the concept of 'right effort' an extraordinarily nuanced one, more to do with how difficult it is to not do anything. In the meditation halls, people sit to observe, with a kind of attention that watches without influence, but soon enough, the discomforts of the body elicit psychological reactivity, which we call the volitions, driven by aversions, impelling the activity to move somehow to alleviate discomfort and produce comfort. The 'effort' is in the immediate recognition of such reactivity, and thereby the cessation thereof. Perhaps after an hour of that sort of determination, the pains intensify and one becomes overwhelmed by their reactivity, and we learn where current limitation lies.

Of course they argue that there isn't a limitation, but then if we try it out ourselves, we find ourselves becoming agitated as our minds become more reactively compulsive. I'm not talking 'ultimate truth', just the truth of oneself, of ones own limitations, to recognise and know these motives that move the mind. That is insight, to know, to realise, as the way of meditation - and not use meditation for the sake of willfully producing experiential conditions one desires.

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These questions, those that derive from them, and all their respective answers - are what each and every legitimate system of yoga (and even religion) - seeks, realizes, validates, and prescribes through both codified teaching, and importantly, its living teachers who do genuinely embody those principles.

Those various means, whether any teacher embodies them, and the methods by which they are effected, constitute the entire framework and purpose of 95% of discussion here.

Also, to add a 'wild card' into the mix, and to challenge any misguided crypto-dualists posing as NA proponents since this is the 'non-dual' forum...
Regarding this point which is quite significant: It is both metaphorical as a general principle, but at the point of 'ripeness' for those specific cases of consequential preparedness, quite literal and inescapable as a possibility.

So the question of 'self' here is similar to the issue of 'you' in the above. Again, who is this 'self'?

What I call self isn't an individual, and it's the same one aware as me, you, him, her, everyone according the their particular sensory perception. We think there is an individual we call Gem, and of course there an individuation in my experience, but that one named Gem only really exists psychologically. Not so imaginary as is a unicorn, but as a constructed subject of all past experience.

Like a ghost, it thinks it is alive and conscious, but one day after several days meditation, it separated from myself, and I could watch it in the minds eye like it was my ghost. It's a faker in pretense that it is me, and my noticing and observation of it caused it to panic, because all it lives on is the psychological energy of mental reactivity. In this watching of it it revealed how it operates to distract me so it can assume the position 'me' while I remain unaware. That's the egoic function, as reaction is distraction, and this false sense of self we call the ego can't continue as 'me' without all that psychological reactivity which is the distraction. And just as well, because it is not a pleasant characher in anyway.

Now I address you, I already know there isn't a Gem 'in real life', and all my impressions of self and your impressions of me and my impressions of you are basically fabrications or mentalities, and that one I've called 'self' is not 'other' as any distinctions between us.

That to me is the metta called loving kindness, not sentimental emotion or acts of kindness, but that deeper 'self' expression/knowing as 'us'.

Hence I don't advocate forcing ones self into service and trying to be kind, only looking deeply into these aspirations and the desire that pertains to the self reward, because the true wish entailed in metta isn't of the volitions, but the living expression of self. In that, everything is motivated toward the happiness of all beings.

Any human being so realized in that Oneness actually consciously embodies and has access to that oneness of Self, of all Being, who they are and know as a full subjective Identity, and therefore consciously and essentially are 'you' as well as a result. In that subjective Identity, but significantly within a mutually agreed teacher/student relationship, they are or represent both the realized 'you', may identify with the aspiring 'you' and importantly within in that context - they are the very means of that realization because in and through that oneness so consecrated, there is mutual free access to it - its purpose and means, one and the same in each - only in different forms.

That makes sense, but in all my spiritual life I have only once regarded someone as a sort of guruic figure, but they told to stop judging them as someone special and imagining them as something they are not. Since then I've held every person in equal high regard of a standard I would have regarded 'my guru'.

I think the lesson of the relation is this: if you hold a spiritual personality in particularly high regard, it only shows that you do not hold everyday people, or indeed yourself, in the highest regard possible. For some reason special high regard is conditional on imagining someone as highly spiritual, and I have had the opportunity to realise the judgements that entails.

This is the implication of Oneness in the dynamic physical multiplicity - but especially for those consciously seeking and practicing some form of yoga - and not simply dedicated to preserving a selectively speculative stillborn intellectual theory.


~ J

If we can discern between what is mentally fabricated and what is 'happening anyway', we may direct our interest from the mind's volitions to the spontaneously arising, and what could be 'surrender' other than the forsaking of our volition?