Is enlightenment an illusion?

I'm not sure what I said but awareness, intuition, and, attention, doesn't exist without consciousness. And, experience is not 'outside' but part of this whole mechanism. All subject/object experience can only be explained through logic which is the accumulation of mankind's information and accessed through the mechanism of memory. It is one process. The key element that creates 'botheration' is the sense of self. The thinking mechanism is linking one experience to another and creating a sense of continuity. This continuity is what we call our self. It is not a being and doesn't reside in any center located anywhere. It resides in all of your cells as what we call the mind does not reside in the brain but in your whole body. The sense of I is not in the head but everywhere. That link-up by the thinking mechanism is connecting one experience to another giving rise to a sense of continuity. The task then is to 'interrupt' that linkup in order to allow the body to function as it should without the sense of self. The joke is that you can't do it because the mechanism that sees the continuity is trying to survive and continue. It is not in its interest to be interrupted. Termination will be avoided at all costs. At what point, do we give up trying?

"Fluids come together & the I AM appears"
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

......& it's always after the event.KK

Source;http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Eb...i_complete.pdf

'botheration' - the more one tries the less quiet it is?

Death could be the end of botheration, don't you think?

Yep!

Death to Botheration! Death, I say!


Actually, I think this is about right: what most people want is peace.

(just a theory...)

In the words of Peter Pan, to die would be an awfully big adventure.

Nice.

But when I saw your name, i thought you might have come to tell us that all accountants seek balance!

What's in a name ?
That which we call a rose
By any other name
Would smell as sweet

Scandojazzbuff, why ? It is the way of the world. Nick, most people want life for better or for worse. Wants do not change anything.

and the playwrights continue to spin the tale...............

B.: The notions of bondage and liberation are merely
modifications of the mind. They have no reality of their own,
and therefore cannot function of their own accord. Since they
are modifications of something else, there must be an entity
(independent of them) as their common source and support. If,therefore, one investigates into that source in order to know of whom the bondage or liberation is predicated, one will find that
they are predicated of ‘me’, that is, oneself. If one then earnestly
enquires ‘Who am I?’ one will see that there is no such thing as ‘I’
or ‘me’. That which remains on seeing that the ‘I’ does not exist,
is realised vividly and unmistakably as self-luminous and subsisting
merely as Itself. This vivid Realisation, as a direct and immediate
experience of the supreme Truth, comes quite naturally, with
nothing uncommon about it, to everyone who, remaining just
as he is, enquires introspectively without allowing the mind to
become externalised even for a moment or wasting time in mere
talk. There is, therefore, not the least doubt regarding the wellestablished
conclusion that to those who have attained this
Realisation and thus abide absolutely identical with the Self, there
is neither bondage nor liberation.1
B.: The Self is Pure Consciousness. Yet a man identifies
himself with the body which is insentient and does not itself
say: ‘I am the body’. Someone else says so. The unlimited Self
does not. Who does? A spurious ‘I’ arises between Pure
Consciousness and the insentient body and imagines itself to
be limited to the body. Seek this and it will vanish like a
phantom. The phantom is the ego or mind or individuality. All
the scriptures are based on the rise of this phantom, whose
elimination is their purpose. The present state is mere illusion.
Its dissolution is the goal and nothing else.2
Bhagavan here refers to the ego as the ‘phantom’ or a ‘spurious
I’. In the explanation to the two Parsi ladies quoted earlier, he
spoke of a ‘false I’ and a ‘true I’. For practical purposes, he did
sometimes speak of giving up the false ‘I’ in quest of the true,
but that should not be taken as implying that there are two
selves in a man. What he really meant was simply giving up the
false identification of the ‘I’ as an individual being in order to
realise one’s true identity as the universal Self. He frequently
insisted that there are not two ‘I’s of which one can seek and
know the other. According to the truth of non-duality, to see
the Self is to be the Self; otherwise, there would be the duality
of a subject and object and the trinity of seer, sight and seen.

Source; http://www.messagefrommasters.com/Eb...wn%20Words.pdf

But getting rid of wants will change things.
Place your order, forget the complete uncertainty of wanting!

We only need look at what wanting brings about in the world to know what grief it creates. Wanting this, that, the other and the next thing is never ending and an awful spiral for so many. Presumably though, everyone here wants for little, being well fed, watered and so on - yet i'd bet my bottom dollar there's a terrific lot of wanting and window shopping going on.. because we can't have anything we want and thinking we want a thing only works to produce that precise experience - wanting.

Agree.

The question always begs the answer, How do you get rid of wants? Once you ask this question, the trouble begins. It is not necessary or possible to get rid of wants. It is what you are, or what we think we are. No manipulation of desire such as repression, mind-control, or, mantra, brings about a real end to desire. The very thought of an 'end' is a concept within this cycle of wanting. Understanding this brings about some kind of disinterest very naturally. It seems to escape most people that anything you try to 'do' is working against yourself.