Is enlightenment an illusion?

Easy for JK to say, eh?

This is a repeat of 'Yes, Master' from buddhism or christianity.

Alright you are spared the self-flagellation and allowed the Self-deprecation!

just to blah blah that no doubt all of us in this chat are conscious of consciousness, yet it is the most difficult thing to understand even though it is the heart of our ‘life’ experience.

The experience is say like, knowing that part of oneself is larger than tiny me, can separate itself from my botherations and talk back etc – half the mystery unfolded right there, what this is really about is awareness.

If non-local, i.e. universal consciousness can be experienced, you wouldn’t say known, (because there is zero idea of what are the deeper fundamental universal relationships out of which human consciousness emerges, where what was just a potential manifests to a well-formed, enduring and contributing part of the greater whole and being as atoms only comprise about 4% of the universal dal, there’s a long way to go), yet it still remains what are you going to do with the knowledge, while still materially entangled in relationships with the world appearance.

To this organism, relationships seem overwhelmingly to be about 'states of cooperation'. Maybe it’s only to the extent we can think about the world ‘from inside’, from the ‘authentic’ point of view each of us actually has in this ongoing present moment, the now that connects us into the web of existence, that we can begin to appreciate the kind of ‘relationships’ that the world is made of.

Of course rocks have relationships with other things. Every electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., connection is a relationship, though the primary substance of reality are not objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships. Today’s western physical theories still have such a hard time explaining consciousness because they subscribe to a view of matter that from the outset excludes mind.

Here's a thought: those who have had an experience or insight may not use the same language as those who have not.

We cannot understand Consciousness because we ARE Consciousness. If there were really a way to understand all of this, there wouldn't be so many explanations and descriptions held up as 'models'. Everyone including the Great Ones are speaking through a point of view. They are never the thing itself and this is one of the big hurdles to get through. It is all an intellectual explanation. The only thing that you and I know, really know, is that you exist. And, without you, the universe disappears. If you really ARE both the local(micro) and non-local (macro) consciousness, all questions regarding what to do, how to do, where to do it, stop. There is a different way of knowing what you need to know. It is only our thinking that asks these questions which have no answers. Our thinking, which gives rise to the sense of separateness from others, demands an answer. The key is to be released from this constant demand of thought to 'find an answer'. All of a sudden, this hot air evaporates into the fire of Life which begins to burn through your being stronger than our 20 watt light bulbs we call ourselves. Can you feel it, bro?

Even those who have had an experience or insight use different language to describe it. This is why all models cannot be used for your own map. You will need your own.

Perhaps you know, I don't. Do you mean after my physical death, the universe will cease to exist? Did that happen after the countless people who have died earlier? Your statements are a bit confusing. Perhaps JK or UG knew.

After your death, the universe will indeed end for you, as you presently know yourself. But, I didn't say the universe ends.

Is there a universe without you, Aup? Even when you sleep, it disappears. This should give you a hint at what it's connected to, your mind. No?

By strange coincidence or synchronicity (i'll let you decide) i just happen to be reading a book on this very subject at the moment, called "toward a psychology of awakening" by a psychologist/psychotherapist called John Welwood who's also had a strong interest in Buddhism since the 60's.
Here's a few quotes i think are relevant to this conversation;

The new model of unconscious process that i propose is based on the
assumption that human experience is an interactive way of organizing
or relating to reality (to the physical world, other people, life, and
Being itself), rather than some kind of inner, purely mental phenomenon.
In this light, conscious and unconscious are not two separate
regions of a psyche, but rather two different modes in which the bodymind
organism structures relatedness. Unconscious process is a holistic
mode of organizing experience and responding to reality that operates outside
the normal span of focal attention. This mode of functioning
takes account of larger fields of interconnectedness without breaking
them into linear, sequential units. What is unconscious, then, are the
holistic ways in which the body-mind organism experiences its interconnectedness
with reality, prior to the articulations of reflective
thought.
This holistic body-mind processing displays an intelligence that is
nonreflective and nonintellectual. It operates in the background of the
experiential field, whose foreground consists of the workings of focal
attention, which pinpoints discrete objects of thought, feeling, and perception.
Unconscious process may be nonlinear, but it is not inherently
dark or unknowable. It is only unknowable through focal
attention, which would necessarily distort its nature by breaking its
larger fields of interconnectedness into serial, discrete elements,
There is another kind of attention-a diffuse attention that allows
a whole field to be experienced all at once, without linear analysis.
While diffuse attention plays an important, often unrecognized role
in ordinary awareness, it reaches its fullest expression in meditation
and non dualistic experience, where the focus of attention broadens
out for longer periods of time, and the conventional subject/object
division dissolves in a larger field of awareness.


What follows is a phenomenological description of four progressively
wider, interpenetrating levels of the normally unconscious background
of experience. The word levels has no topological meaning
here, but refers instead to "fields within fields" or "grounds within
grounds." Each of these fields shapes how we relate to reality and
allows for a certain kind of knowing. The wider background fields
shape everyday consciousness in a global, all-encompassing way, while
the more "frontal" fields allow for more differentiated kinds of
knowing.
The unconscious ground can be differentiated into four levels: the
situational ground of felt meaning-our implicit felt sense of the immediate
situation we are in the personal ground-how patterns of past
experience and accumulated meaning implicitly shape our present
consciousness, behavior, and worldview; the transpersonal ground-the
ways in which the body-mind organism is attuned to larger, universal
qualities of existence; and the open ground-pure, immediate presence
to reality prior to identification with the body-mind organism.

Wisdom... is incommunicable

More quotes from "toward a psychology of awakening"

While the transpersonal ground can be experienced as a sense of oneness
between self and world, it still involves a subtle identification
with the body-mind organism. Beyond the oneness of the transpersonal
ground lies the zero-ness of the open ground, which indicates an even
deeper interpenetration with reality.
This widest ground of experience is a pure, immediate interrelational
presence before it becomes differentiated into subject-object
relationship perception. Experientially, the open ground can be felt as
the sense of pure being that underlies all our differentiated experiences.
As Trungpa describes this, "Our most fundamental state of
mind ... is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious
quality; and we have now and have always had this openness. It is
natural being which just is."
Split-second flashes of this open ground-also described in Buddhism
as primordial awareness, original mind, or no-mind-are happening
all the time before events become interpreted in a particular
way. This kind of presence is so transparent and all-encompassing that
it usually recedes into the background of the experiential field, while
the differentiated objects of attention,thougbts, emotions, perceptions-
occupy the focus of attention.Yet it can be discovered in every fresh moment of awareness, before our thought cloaks it in concepts.
As the psychologist Matte Blanco describes this:
The findings of introspection suggest that there is, in fact, a very fleeting
instant of prise de conscience, or "becoming aware," ... when sensation
is in consciousness in a naked state, not clothed in either explicit
or implicit propositions, not even rudimentary ones. But an essential
feature of this phenomenon is that it is fleeting. As soon as it arises in
consciousness, sensation is caught by thoughts, wrapped by them.
Or as Trungpa describes it:
When we see an object, in the first instant there is a sudden perception
which has no logic or conceptualization to it at all, we just perceive
the thing in the open gronnd. Then immediately we begin to rush
about trying to add something to it, either trying to find a name for it
or trying to find pigeon-holes in which we could locate and categorize
it. Gradually things develop from there.
We continually recreate our conceptual versions of reality through
this instantaneous, automatic wrapping of naked awareness in thought
and interpretation schemes that are imbued with personal meanings
and associations. For instance, as I listen to a bird singing, my attention
may be captivated by feelings the song arouses in me or by
thoughts and associations that arise in response to it. What I normally
do not notice is the sheer clarity of presence that is the ground and
pure essence of this experience. Nonetheless, it is possible to notice
this larger transparency through split-second gaps that appear in the
normally dense fabric of mind. First thing in the morning, right after
waking up, before thinking begins to take over, is a prime time to
glimpse this open, spacious ground of awareness.
In meditation, awareness of the open ground breaks through as we
wear out the projects and distractions of thought and emotion. Suddenly
there appears a gap in the stream of thought, a flash of clarity
and openness. It is neither particularly mystical or esoteric, nor any
kind of introverted self-consciousness, but a clear perception of direct
reality, or suchness.
From a Buddhist perspective, ignorance is the failure to recognize
this larger ground of pure awareness underlying all the objects of consciousness,
while treating the latter as objective reality. This pure
awareness is our original nature, and meditation is the major way to
let it emerge from the background position to which it has been relegated.
In Zen satori the emergence of the basic ground can have a
sudden and dramatic quality-as the "bottom of the bucket breaking
through" to the thoroughly clear, ever-present awareness in which the
subject/object and conscious/unconscious dichotomies disappear, and
things stand out clearly as what they are.
This fundamental ground of pure awareness is an unconditional
presence that can become faceted, shaped, or elaborated without losing
its expansive openness. From this perspective, awareness begins
with pure openness; it first becomes differentiated at the transpersonal
level, then individualized at the personal level, and finally particularized
at the situational level. Although awareness becomes more and
more faceted, further and further shaped at each more differentiated
level of consciousness, its open, unconditioned nature is ever present,
even in the most fixated states of mind. This open ground, though
beyond the grasp of focal attention (and in this sense "unconscious"),
is not a mysterious psychic region but is perfectly knowable, both in
fleeting glimpses and in sudden awakening. It is a deep level of mind/
world interpenetration that goes far beyond conceptualization and
thought. By tapping into this wider attunement, meditation allows for
a more direct, precise relationship with what is. At this level of open
awareness, "the meditator develops new depths of insight through direct
communication with the phenomenal world. Conceptualized
mind is not involved in the perception and so we are able to see with
great precision, as though a veil had been removed from our eyes."
The open ground is always present. At any moment, especially if
one sharpens one's attention through meditation, one may glimpse
this ineffable, nonspecifiab!e, omnipotential open awareness that underlies
specific mind-states.

Not having Internet for 36 hours is not an illusion .

I kept up with some of the earlier posts on the phone, but it is too much past bedtime to dig into meaty stuff now. I'll be back tomorrow

When you die, your relationship with the universe will revert to the same condition as before you were born.

Nick, I think my response was quite insufficient, mainly because, most of us are only dealing with this personal sense of self, the psychological movement we call 'me'. Ego is very much involved on this level as the center of self.

After reading KK's posts, I realize that I did not address the unconscious properly. One of the aspects of the unconscious is that it is 'hidden' and can't be understood like we can understand our normal thinking and perception and put it all together to form a Nick or Scando. But, with the cessation of ego, or even before this happens, we can begin to sense that what is unconscious has to do with what is sort of 'inherited' through the DNA and contains the history of mankind and all its archetypes and images. We don't seem prepared to deal with this until there is another kind of knowing present other than the intellectual. The absence of ego allows access into this 'region'. Beyond ego loss, self still operates until this accumulation is completely 'cleaned' out in a further transformation. Both conscious and unconscious disappear along with any sense of self. This is what is reported by some who have gone through this.

We seem to need to intellectualize all of this. Each person knows in themselves whether they are fragmented or not. First things first. Somehow, the hold that thinking has on us must be loosened and broken. You cannot think yourself into real understanding. This in itself, seems to be the hardest thing for people to get. Once you get this, something else opens up and takes you along. Big Daddy?

Wow. And there was I thinking of the unconscious as just a bunch of suppressed memories that restrict us in some ways and facilitate us in other ways, but are hard to actually access or know.

Well, now I come to read your post, yes, I seem to remember that there are two schools of psychoanalysis (and all their branches): one of which deals in matters of more ordinary life, and another which deals in these far deeper concepts of archetypes. I'm possibly never going to read a text book in this, but I did read a very interesting description of the latter form of analysis a year or so ago. It was fiction, but I don't hold that against it: quite the opposite, much of my learning comes from well written and well-informed novels, from the sociology of Dickens and Collins onwards.

My net connectivity is intermittent. It will not be fixed until tomorrow, as the company is not allowed to dig up the main road except in the night, do I am yet to be able to give time to previous posts.