karl says:
It stands to reason that if one had the correct goals and applied themselves - enlightenment should be possible in a lifetime
Phil says:
Actually, it can occur today
Phil says:
The essential event is the courage to act on the knowledge that the Divine wants you to serve it's purposes, today, and in all instants to follow
Phil says:
Once you act on that knowledge that we are all born with, and that the ego is born to struggle against, you instantly die
Phil says:
the you that dies is the you that has been busy designing the future
Phil says:
mapping out your growth,your path, your stategy
Phil says:
The hard thing is that this same "you" is the one that has been doing the seeking, and it is damned proud of what it has learned, and it does not want to surrender its fate to the whims of a life of service to the divine
karl says:
fear is the block
karl says:
death of the ego
Phil says:
The ego is a survival mechanism that has been 2 million + years in the making
Phil says:
Only rarely does a person come along willing or even able to risk the loss of that crucial survival tool
Phil says:
Even the "enlightened" teachers I have read seem to be carrying along really big ego's
Karl says:
Phil says:
Perhaps a true loss of identity is not even possible - due to the way the mind constructs a past from memory that the ego owns and identifies with
Karl says:
What are we that we are so different from animals governed by instinct? Are we so different? Is language itself the fall from grace - when the one becomes two and subject object metaphysics is born?
Karl says:
The half animal half alien theory is popular here in the land of the new age
Phil says:
In a way science will continue to illucidate, that the animal mind was ONE with the world at one time, and perhaps the enlightenment experience of divine unity is in fact a genetic artifact of earlier structures in the mind that were COMPLETELY in tune with the world: lost senses like knowing your are being watched (hunted), projecting your consciousness across a valley, around a corner (to hunt),
Phil says:
calling a loved one mentally in a time of great distress (to survive an attack)
Phil says:
I wonder if an enlightened person or teacher, going through life with the primary central goal of their existence being service to the divine, the evolutionary perfection of humanity and life in the universe through the continual development of novel experience and increased complexity, can ever really say that their ego is not experiencing that process
Phil says:
Perhaps rather than the ego dying, it is in fact seeking purposes higher than survival of self, and in serving perfection of humanity over perfection of self, it finds a cause that it associates with so strongly that the self-absorbance of the ego is all that dies, and the ego expands to encompace all life, all time, all process.
Phil says:
In that re-association, one can say "I was Born Again", I was Enlightened, I experienced or continue moment by moment to experience one-ness with all that is and ever was or will be
Karl says:
Ravi Shankar refers to the ego as the shell of a seed which we need to protect us, until it's time to grow and flower, he says of the ego don't begrudge the seed its shell.
Phil says:
I like that
Karl says:
not ego death, but ego expansion, I like that