ThinkExist Guest Post

From ThinkExist.

By Stephen

[ I work at Ruthless Truth where we liberate people from the lie of self allowing them to embrace life fully and see clearly for what may be the first time. I also run a blog where I focus my efforts on bringing liberation to the public by any means necessary. ]

START
I would like to start this article gently, but the truth is. No matter how I put this, it will seem odd. No matter how I say this, it will rub someone up the wrong way. No matter how delicately I handle this it, will challenge the foundations of your entire life.

If moving towards the truth is not what you want. If breaking free of the ties that have bound your life. If a rejection of the very reason you are here now, searching for freedom is not what you are after, stop reading now.

I’ll assume whoever is left only wants one thing: the cold and ruthless truth. Now to dispense with the pleasantries…

You do not exist.

What? How? Why?

I could explain logically that for self to exist it must be outside of reality-manipulating reality, and that anything outside of reality is unreal.

I could tell you that all you have ever had of your self is your thoughts about it. Just as your thoughts about unicorns do not mean unicorns are real, your thoughts about yourself are nothing more than thoughts.

We could delve into the many linguistic errors in this piece and ask “if you don’t exist why do you use the word ‘I’ so much”. I know, as you now know, that use of a word does not prove the existence of its namesake. We must simply do our best with the limited “selfish” language we were given.

I do not expect you to believe me

In fact I don’t want belief. I want you to discover it for yourself that you have no self (clever, eh?).

I’d like to offer that all we really know for sure is what we are experiencing right now. Memory is fallible, the past and future never come or go. All we can know is our direct experience of what is in the present moment.

With that in mind, I want you to pay direct attention to your experience of life right now.

Take a look at this self, which thinks your thoughts and moves your body. If it truly thinks your thoughts then it must exist apart from those thoughts. Pay attention to your experience; do you experience this self outside of thought?

Sure you have thoughts about the self, but look at experience, do those thoughts come from a self?

More importantly what are each of those thoughts DOING ? Are they trying to convince that there is a self?

I resisted this at first too..

The first thing I thought when I tried this was “Of course there is a self, this is stupid.” However as I watched, I realized that all my thoughts were about a self, but there was no self thinking up the thoughts.
I began to rationalize that I must be the brain because the brain thinks up the thoughts, but it hit me hard between the eyes. I don’t experience the brain thinking up thoughts.
I just experience thoughts arising conditioned by experience. It wasn’t my experience, I wasn’t there thinking the thoughts. There was only experience conditioned thoughts.

Sure there was a body and a mind, but the driver seat was empty. Life was automatic. As I looked around the room I sat in, the haze began to lift. My entire world fell apart. Only, it wasn’t my world and had never been. My whole life made sense, because it was never truly my life.

How has this affected me?

It’s an intense and real freedom, this liberation from erroneous assumption of self. From the time from the thought first entered my head, till my taking a look at the experience of life in that moment was roughly 7 minutes.

In mid September 2010 I saw life for what it is. It’s changed me for the better since. I can see clearly now. I tend not to get caught in emotional feedback loops and the idea of self. I still have it I just see that I have it, and see it for what it is.

Since I got this I’ve dedicated my life to bringing this to other people. I’ve been taking a little break but over the first 6 months I liberated 13 people . I have many friends who also pledged themselves to free this world. It’s hasn’t been easy there have been many ups and downs. We’ve stared into the abyss together and watched the brightest of stars fall from grace. What we do now we do with eyes open, and what we do is open eyes.

All it took was 7 minutes. I’ve seen people do it in 3. All you need to do is to pay attention to your experience of life. Just look.

By Stephen

[ I work at Ruthless Truth where we liberate people from the lie of self allowing them to embrace life fully and see clearly for what may be the first time. I also run a blog where I focus my efforts on bringing liberation to the public by any means necessary. ]

Some additional supporting videos on the nature of EGO:


Watch out for defensiveness rising in the mind. Which is nothing but the world.

What is this world-mind defending, except illusory identities, mental images.

Some Random quotes from Online forums:

There isn't a “black dot” of the present moment that's slowly moving along a timeline that stretches from your pretended “birth” to your pretended “death.” In truth, there really IS no “timeline.” The tomorrows that you’re imagining are as unreal as the yesterdays that you’re remembering. THIS single moment of NOW is the ONLY moment that is, was or ever will be. And YOU….are THAT.

Because you are the “Immoveable One,” all movement is really illusory. So everything in your long dream life has actually “occurred” at the very place where you’re at right now. In spite of what it seems, you’ve never really moved away from where you’re pretending that you were “born,” “grew up,” had “adventures,” etc. Who-you-are cannot move at all simply because there’s no place “else” for “you” to move into! In fact, you’ve ALREADY “arrived” at the very place where you’ll pretend that you’re going to “die.”

God likes to play on BOTH sides of the street. When you embrace the Shadow, you’re also embracing the Light. After all, the profane is only the sacred….in disguise.

“You” are not appearing in other people’s dreams. In truth, they’ve all been appearing in YOUR dream, and then telling you that there’s a “you” that’s been appearing in THEIR dream, too. Beneath it all, though, there’s still only One dream and only One dreamer.

When you’ve finally let go of your demands, agendas and expectations, “what is” will still be waiting patiently for you at the corner of “Here” and “Now.”

You will never be free unless you free yourself from the prison of your own false thoughts....

"What makes life difficult it how time features us 'defending fiction as if it is fact.' "Reality" features us engaged in "mission impossible": no one can prove the self is real, not even with the prop called 'the ego,' and who you are in THIS wakes up when the truth about that becomes inescapably obvious. Truth features the sum of the lies we use to pretend we can prove truth is false: it's because it is a no win game, that "reality" can feature that parody as "The Grand Charade."

"Any change in circumstances, any activity can not cause a fundamental change in you. One is depending upon addition to possessions, knowledge, favouarble circumstances, upon others whom one considers important to cause a fundamental change in one or to give a stable comfort. It is only when one clearly sees that ‘nothing’ can give you stable comfort or cause a fundamental change in you – you are face to face with yourself ‘as you are’.
It is to find ‘you’ as you are-desiring, wanting, anxious, continuously adjusting with others or environment, being insulted or praised, being hit by unexplainable failures or successes, stuck up in the maze of choices, actions and consequences and so on. This ‘as you are’ is the end of ‘you’. The end of ‘you’ is your connection to the whole. This facing oneself ‘as it is’ is like an explosion. The new mind is born."

-- Y V Chawla.

The Holocaust

From http://popchassid.com/photos-holocaust-narrative/

The Holocaust has scarred us, a yetzer hara (sneaky bastard of a voice in our heads), that keeps trying to tell us how we are defined by our past, controlled by events that happened to us, instead of using those moments as points of growth.

And, in a weird way, that’s why all those images of us looking so helpless, so gaunt, in heaps of nameless bodies, have become a morbid fascination for us.

We, and by extension the rest of the world, have chosen to define the Holocaust with these images. But there are other images. Images that show a more subtle, more true, story.

A story that shows our inner power, our inner turmoil in dealing with a situation we cannot comprehend, our attempts to gain justice, and our final steps into moving above and beyond our past and into a new future.

See more at: Holocaust

The Fourteen Stages of Development (Jainism)

(From Wikipedia)

The fourteen stages of development according to Jainism:

According to the Jain tradition, through the following fourteen stages of development, the soul gradually frees itself, firstly from the worst, then from the less bad and finally from all kinds of karma, and manifests the innate qualities of knowledge, belief and conduct in a more and more perfect form.

The first four gunasthana are related to belief or rationality in perception. As and when the soul acquires rationality in perception it moves on to 4^th gunasthana. Stages 5 to 14 relate to conduct. The purity in conduct determines the gunasthana from the 5^th stage onwards. Those who have taken the anuvratas {minor vows} may reach up to the 5^th Gunasthana. The 6^th to 14^th Gunasthanas can only be attained by those who have taken the Mahavratas (the major vows) of Jain asceticism.

The Fourteen Stages

मिथ्यदृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of wrong belief.
सस्वदानंसंयाग्दृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one who has a slight taste of right belief.
मिश्रदृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of mixed belief.
अविराट संयाग्दृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one who has true belief but has not self discipline.
देसाविराटा संयाग्दृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of partial self-control.
प्रमातसंयत संयाग्दृष्टि गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of complete self-discipline, although sometimes wavering due to negligence.
अप्रमातसंयत गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of self-control without negligence.
निवृत्ति बद्र संपराय गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one in whom the passions are still manifesting in an unevolved form.
अनिवृत्ति बद्र संपराय गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one who practices the process called anivritti karana and in whom passions are still occurring.
सूक्षं संपराय गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one in whom passions occur in a subtle form.
उपासमा कस्याव वित्राग चद्मस्ता गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of one who has suppressed every passion but still does not possess omniscience.
क्सिन कस्याव वित्राग चद्मस्ता गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of who has annihilated every passion but does not yet possess omniscience.
संयोगी केवलिन गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of omniscience with activity.
अयोगी केवलिन गुणस्थानः॥	The stage of omniscience without any activity.

Levels Of Thinking

"George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was an influential spiritual teacher of the early to mid-20th century who taught that most humans live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential." -- Wikipedia.

Gurdjieff taught that thoughts have hypnotic power.
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Levels of thought based on my understanding:

Level 1 : Unaware of thoughts. Can say things like "I think", "I was thinking about XYZ", but has NO IDEA at all what thoughts are.

Such a person, if you say to him something like - "I hear voices in my head" - he will tell you to go to a shrink.

Because he has no idea what thinking is.


Level 2 : Semi aware of thoughts. Understands that thoughts are spoken words. Assumes that his thoughts are correct about everything. Takes pride in the human 'intellect', reasoning etc.


Level 3: Aware of thoughts. Semi aware of the errors in his thinking process. At this level, thoughts could be very painful.


Level 4: Has knowledge of thoughts. Knowledge because he has reached a point where he does not assume that his thoughts are correct all the time.


Level 5 : Thoughts have slowed down and transmuted into a peaceful stream. Quality of thoughts has improved. Because observation of errors in thinking has improved thinking. Consequently the pain has gone.