Psychedelic Infinite Love vs Dependent Origination & No Self

Namaste folks! What follows is a dialog that I had with a friend which I think may help many people who are in the same struggle with longing for love:

I'm pretty confused and lost a lot of the time. I don't think they have hurt me, however.

They have led you to some confused thinking about reality, I can see that, but luckily you aren't in so deep that you are unable to reconsider.

 

When I was younger half the trips I had were bad and all were meaningless.

That actually is better than having good trips, because with bad trips you don't think that you have the truth, at least, usually.

 

Now everything has changed it seems, When I "journey" the one thing that comes up strongly always is love!!!, love myself, love everyone, love more. the two things that seem to work for me are the fungus and the aya and both do this and very feel right and good and healing. Some days in ordinary reality I feel like I'm a long long way from home, very lonely for my tribe, somewhere like in the middle of the sixties with Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Tricksters or just with a group of incredibly beautiful people and deeply loved. Like at the Sat Nam Fest I went to a few years ago... I should probably find a place like that to go. You know what I mean. I just want more love in my life from people I adore, enlightened, awake, loving, creative souls...

Yes, this powerful love is an aspect of what I call luminosity. Luminosity to me is like "truth-value" to the mind. We have to be very careful when confronted with luminosity; we have to examine it deeply and check for any logical inconsistencies. What better way to get someone to believe a bunch of garbage than to flood them with love? That's a cult tactic, and also a common feature of psychedelic experiences and other mystical experiences.

True love is not the love that pulls you in, but rather the natural consequence of finding the automatic perfection. In other words, we can have all kinds of lovely experiences with infinite love, and still be none the wiser, no closer to liberation at all, because we still do not understand the logical source of true love, which is no self. No self & right view leads to complete happiness and the ability to help others reach that happiness as well. Helping others to reach true happiness thru wisdom is what true love IS. Love is not just a warm fuzzy feeling. That's the illusion of love.

It sometimes happens (like for the Catholic nun Bernadette Roberts) that this mystical love-fest ends up in no-self, but that is extremely rare, and even in her case, she still does not understand no-self as a seal, rather as a state, and so she is still not really free of delusions.

So LiberationUnleashed and I do not stress love as important (tho I used to), because love can mean anything to anyone, and following love around almost inevitably leads to more confusion and suffering, even if it may seem to be healing. After all, who is it that needs to be loved? YOU, right? Without you, there's no more loneliness, no more need for love to smooth over the suffering of identity. Then, rather than wanting love to come to us, reality itself oozes love outward in the form of wisdom. 

What did Buddha say about love? He emphasized that we should be compassionate to all beings, wishing them the greatest happiness and freedom. But he also made it clear that such wishing, such compassion, does not itself lead to liberation. It is helpful to free our minds from anger and such, which then allows us to let go of identity, but just focusing on compassion without seeing thru identity via dependent origination is not liberatory. 

Studying the Buddhist cannon helps us to see how the Buddha lived his life as the emissary of truth & wisdom. He did not go around hugging people and telling them how lovely they are. He taught them that they will suffer forever until they conquer self-view. 

It took me a lot of struggle to overcome the pull of the infinite love of the "divine source" that I found via ayahuasca. But once I decided that such an illogical divine source and its love was not enough to satisfy me, realizing the truth of dependent origination, "I" was blessed to go beyond the divine source, to No Mind, in which all appearances are perfectly self-known without any witness consciousness. This has removed all doubt for me in Buddha's teachings, which to begin with do not require blind faith as other teachings do.

 

When I was younger I could have killed my self with drugs several times I think and they were "drugs" (not plant medicine) prescribed by western doctors, alcohol...etc... really nasty stuff... I spent my younger years feeling really miserable for the most part. I still feel very lonely a significant amount of the time...

Feeling lonely is perfect. Sit with that and find the root of that and you'll be free of this ridiculous mind that thinks it is separate.

 

Recently, however I've been making new friends and it's really great, you, Scott, my friend Jim who would like to connect with you, I have him a copy of the book and he's shared books with me. But I don't go out into the world much or have a huge amount of people I connect deeply with or feel akin to. The solution might be  as simple as getting off my ass and going out once in a while or finding the answers though your help and LU but it's feeling worse before it, hopefully, feels better. I mean right now I'm feeling like, well, no God, no future, no me, no nothing, WTF? If you know what I mean. It still is a path I'm going down to be sure.

As long as you can see the logic in dependent origination, you are basically on the path to salvation. All that remains is to remove residual doubt and habits of identification. 

 

I'm grateful to be on a healing path or growth.

Nothing needs healing or growth. As Ajahn Chah said, "With enlightenment, nothing is gained. On the contrary, all is lost." I know that may sound like an unhappy path, but on the contrary, losing everything is the ultimate happiness.

 

Curious though, why me and most are home watching football, drinking beer and getting vaccinated?

Because it is extremely rare for beings to see thru the luminosity, or perception of truth-value, in illusory appearances. Logic is not as enticing as luminosity. Letting go and losing everything is not as enticing as clinging and getting things you want. Count your infinite blessings. You must have been suffering from beginning-less time like all other beings, I imagine, so it's about damn time you got free!

No way to know anything, so what's the point?

Q: There is no way to know anything in my opinion.

A: Well then you must be wrong about that... haha! Get it?

I have found that when people are challenged to rethink their opinions about the nature of reality, they often come up with this idea that "nothing can be known" and therefore they need not take the challenge into consideration. This happens to me all the time, but less now than it used to. 

In fact, to say that nothing can be known, aside from being an oxymoronic statement, means that there is no point in trying to liberate ourselves, since the path to freedom cannot be known. However, if we look at those who have attained the deathless, we see that most (all?) of them have used the mind to know the path out of mind (and thus out of suffering). 

Buddha said that all of the teachings must eventually be left, just as one who crosses onto shore leaves their raft on the beach, but if one leaves the raft of logic while still in the ocean, they are in for some trouble.

Here is a post regarding how to view the mind practically, in a middle-path kind of way.

And here's a useful snippet I snagged:

And as Kyle Dixon quoted,

"…The process of eradicating avidyā is conceived… not as a mere stopping of thought, but as the active realization of the opposite of what ignorance misconceives. Avidyā is not a mere absence of knowledge, but a specific misconception, and it must be removed by realization of its opposite. In this vein, Tsongkhapa says that one cannot get rid of the misconception of 'inherent existence' merely by stopping conceptuality any more than one can get rid of the idea that there is a demon in a darkened cave merely by trying not to think about it. Just as one must hold a lamp and see that there is no demon there, so the illumination of wisdom is needed to clear away the darkness of ignorance."

Napper, Elizabeth, 2003, p. 103

This post is also very useful on the three modes of knowing reality.

How does magic work if all things are dependently originated?

With the view of dependent origination, we see that things happen due to conditions. There are even certain laws that can be expressed regarding the various mechanisms of causation (i.e. gravity, electromagnetism, etc.), although the word causation is a sticky one because there is never one cause for anything, and the laws themselves are ultimately unexplainable except that we observe them functioning (i.e. we must assume that "somehow" the electromagnetic force exists). 

The most obvious question that people have when first considering the idea of universal laws, is something like this: how is it that the universe has laws if yogis are able to break all laws of nature with the power of their minds?

I could come up with some hypothesis of how yogic powers are able to "alter" laws of nature or what we perceive as altering, but it wouldn't be worth my time. First, let me note that pretty much every yogi (even non-buddhist ones) that I've read of has stated that siddhis (spiritual powers) are mere illusion, just tricks, and so it is best not to demonstrate them to folks as it will only confuse them more. It is possible, for example, that Jesus did not really walk on water--maybe it was just a mass hypnotism. But, it's also possible that he exploited some physical law like thixotropy, which most folks don't understand: http://www.dedoimedo.com/physics/cornflour.html

Remember, any technology sufficiently advanced will appear as magic. Hold an iPhone up to Isaac Newton and he might think you have magical powers.

Regardless of the particular explanation we choose for so-called magic, ultimately, we must remember that this "magic" itself happened due to conditions. Conditions like, for example, the yogi desiring to perform the miracle. Why did the yogi desire to do that? You see, so even the magical yogi is not free from conditions (although he may be blissfully unaware of this fact, as are most of us, most of the time). 

Is everything "nothing"? Is it all "One Mind"? Or dependently originated?

I often find that folks have a few illogical ideas about the nature of reality which crop up once the common views are seen thru.

First, the "everything is nothing" idea:  Actually, I can see why a very rough understanding of dependent origination would be simply that "there is nothing." That's because when we commonly think of "something," we are imagining some kind of essence. In reality, there are no essences to anything, since everything arises dependent upon everything else, so to that simple mindset used to imputing inherency to things, dependent origination may as well be "there is nothing." But compare the simplicity of "there is nothing" (which also makes no sense of reality, merely negating it all), to the incredible profundity of dependent origination: http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2009/10/dzogchen-rigpa-and-dependent.html

The most obvious problem with the "everything is nothing" idea is that it explains nothing. Which is fine, if you don't mind being completely ignorant. But then what is the point of having this view if everything is nothing? The view itself is nothing, so does not even exist?

Tell me what you think of this,

Everything that's happened, never happened, it's a thought living in your consciousness falsely perceived as being in the nonexistent past. The point is the past doesn't exist so nothing that ever happened really happened and of course

the same holds true for the future and the present which is undefinable. I'm enjoying this.

Again, I think you are getting stuck in this either/or mode of perception. Either things are real, or they aren't, for you. 

What I'm trying to show you is that the either/or is not the way reality is. Buddha said that self neither exists, nor doesn't exist, nor both exists and doesn't exist, nor neither exists nor doesn't exist. That's the famous "tetralemma" which he applied to all things. What is the point of that? The point is that dependent origination is not simply about denying reality as it is experienced. It is about explaining it logically so that it can be seen for what it is.

Perhaps it would be better to say, "everything that's happened happened as interdependent processes functioning perfectly and ultimately timelessly, but was misperceived to be independent, linear and discrete events which caused suffering."

Second, the "everything is One Mind" idea: I can say that I have experienced One Mind many times... so I understand it from that level of experience.

But I've also come to realize, as Bill F. explains, that One Mind experience is simply the last illusion that remains due to conditioned belief in the self. In other words, we still cling to the notion of self, the background permanent awareness that all things spring from or are contained in, even tho we can't locate it, so instead, we say, oh, well then everything is self, it is all One Mind. Thus, we are still suffering in order to continue splitting reality into two: the universe (let's say appearances), and that universal consciousness which is aware of everything. In order to stop splitting reality up like this, we have to let go of the idea that there is something separate containing everything else. Then we arrive at dependent origination, the view that everything is a reflection of everything else (NOT that everything IS everything else)... i.e. it is not possible for anything to affect anything else without also itself being affected, nor is it possible for anything to be unaffected or not affect the rest of the universe. This much I actually did see with ayahuasca originally, but somehow this infinite reflection (Indra's Net) also had the One Mind identity traces within it.

With One Mind, we haven't actually gotten away from self or any of the suffering caused by self. We've simply expanded our view of self and lost sight of much of the previously clearly visible suffering. Why does one in One Mind consciousness still suffer, even if almost imperceptibly? Because the clinging to a fixed nature remains, yet in reality there is nothing that is fixed or unchanging ever. Since the One Mind is a fabrication, clinging to it does not lead to freedom from the cycle of birth and death. Every fabrication will eventually dissolve due to the changing conditions which it relies upon for its support.

Also, importantly, One Mind does not have much explanatory power. It does not explain why there are such a variety of appearances rather than just one appearance of the One Mind. It also does not explain how so much of the one mind can be apparently unaware of the One Mind. The one thing that One Mind does explain is the amazing sense of unity among all apparently separate appearances that can be realized. This unity is actually the infinite interpenetration and reflection of all appearances which dependently originate from each other, but without seeing dependent origination, we have no choice but to imagine that there must be One Mind.  

Zen teachings have some interesting things to say about the illusion of One Mind. Check the fourth paragraph on this page:

http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/2015/02/bill-f-practice-and-insights.html

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Buddha said that the first being in each universe falls under the delusion that it created the universe, since it finds itself alone in it and only after wishing for company does it find others existing in it. This first being thinks it is the God of the universe, but with the demise of the universe comes the demise of this and all other beings. I find this an interesting idea, although it isn't necessarily important for the current discussion.

To detach or engage? What is true love?

Question: "I do get the release of ego and "I" part...where I have difficulties is the detachment.  If we are not meant to be engaged, why did we choose these flesh bags? "

Answer: Ok so you are conflating detachment with non-engagement perhaps. Detachment happens automatically when you see the truth: everything happens due to conditions, therefore it's not you doing anything, there's nobody here to be attached to, nor anyone to attach to anyone... ya know? But even the concept of detachment is a tricky one, because it conjures up the notion that there is someone detaching from something (like a dissociative disorder). Perhaps better is "primordial unattachment," but nobody is going to remember to say all that. 

As for engagement, it is always the case. Everything is always engaged. I think in Buddhism this is called total exertion. Everything is operating at 100% of its ability. The only reason we can't see that is because of identity clouding the view. 

One very divisive idea is love. Many people think that love is something mundane. They think a mother has unconditional love for her children. But that is obviously false, because the mother only has so-called love for her children *because* (she thinks) they are her children. That is completely conditional. At any time she might decide to "disown" them and then consider they are not her children. This happens all the time, especially in my culture (ashkenazi jewish--my grandmother disowned our whole side of the family because i was uncircumcised). Or in the case of a father (or even mother) who somehow finds out via DNA evidence that the child was not theirs. Either due to cheating or maybe switched in the hospital. Now it is a choice: Do I consider the child mine still? Do I still give it my "unconditional" love?

And even this very love itself, what is it? Wishing that someone be happy? But how can we wish for someone to be happy if we do not understand what true happiness is? Buddha's view on happiness is almost diametrically opposed to the common view. Happiness which does not come from letting go of identity is not real happiness. It is the trickster's version of happiness because it keeps you begging for more. 

True love arises from true detachment, ironically. Only with true detachment can we realize true happiness, and only then can we have true compassion for others, helping them to realize the great infinite happiness of no self. If all we know is false happiness, then our so-called love will only lead others to suffer more. For example we may know heroin as the ultimate happiness and so we give our partner some heroin. A friend of mine's mother gave her Xanax when she was a kid because she thought Xanax was the ultimate happiness, and of course now she suffers from anxiety. Or we can give affection, thinking that is the ultimate happiness. Of course, affection is very important for humans, especially little humans, but at some point it becomes just another desire to overcome. 

As Thusness (from the blog Awakening to Reality) says, "Your letting go must be more thorough than any nihilist. Your presence must be more thorough than any realist."

Now, as for your question of "why did we choose these flesh bags?" Once again, that is assuming 2 things: there is a "we" who chose, and second, that there is such a thing as agency/choice. Everything happens automatically due to conditions, logically, and so whatever "choice" there may have been was the same kind of choice a computer has in executing one piece of code vs another. Just a bunch of if-then statements. But there was a set of conditions that led to this mindstream's "birth" in this flesh bag--and basically it was due to habitual ignorance giving rise to identification with appearances.

When you have a dream, do you choose to identify as a dream character? No, not really, although in a sense yes, because you could have done a lot of meditation beforehand or taken galantamine or something to help you have a lucid dream and break out of identifying with any character in the dream. 

How does an Awakened person perceive the world? True Self vs No Self

Namaste friends!

I found this article (thanks Soh Wei Yu for linking it) which is a description of a Christian mystic's vision of non-duality. In the article, the author explains that he thinks altho the mystic is viewing things from a True Self perspective, he thinks that really it would be the same thing to call it No Self.

Here is my response posted in the comments:

I have to say that I think the premise that True Self and No Self are equal is based upon never having true No Self experience. Most people never do have No Self experience, but those who go beyond True Self into No Self, pretty much all agree that True Self was a delusion & not true liberation. Catholic nun Bernadette Roberts may not be the best person to talk about this since she does not have "anatta realization," (aka "always already the case" no-self realization) but even her limited experience with No Self has shown her that the unity with God she experienced prior to that was just delusion. As of this writing, her latest book is "What is Self?" although I also have her unpublished addendum to that.

With True Self it feels like there is this background identity to everything. Like in One Mind. But with "my" no mind experiences, there is no background identity. No identity at all. Everything is its own appearance, aware of itself with no central reference point. Like imagine every atom in the room seeing the room from its vantage point, understanding things from its vantage point, and that understanding totally interpenetrating every other atom's understanding. It goes up to every level of organization of appearances. But there is no Room Awareness or Universe Awareness which subsumes it all.

Compared to No Mind, True Self or One Mind is extremely easy to imagine, i think. But No Mind is almost impossible for people to imagine... having said that, when I explain this to folks as I have just now, I find that many of them are able to have the experience if they try for it (even if they have to get help from a psychedelic agent due to poor concentration in meditation). And yes, I know, the experience is just an experience to remove doubt, not an end in itself.

Ultimately, the reason that True Self is not liberation is because there is still identity in it, even if it is very subtle and glowingly beautiful. All identities are born and die. It may take billions of years for the God identity to die & be reborn in another realm, but this is what will happen to it, according to Buddha. And it makes sense logically. Imagine identifying AS a dream (rather than a dream character). You may think you've escaped the death that all the dream characters will face, yet you forget the dream will also end, which will be the end of the dream identity also.

Can Psychedelics like ayahuasca help us wake up to the truth?

Namaste friends!

As you may know from my first post on this blog, psychedelics and especially ayahuasca were the thing that broke my mind wide open and eventually led me to find Buddhism (dependent origination) in my search for answers.

And yet, from what I have found in talking to hundreds of people online who have tried ayahuasca and other psychedelics, it seems that most often the result of this is what happened to me for a few years: vastly inflated ego and delusional thinking.

This is also possible with many spiritual paths, of course. Any path which does not teach NO SELF via dependent origination, is liable to get people into "I AM" or "One [Universal] Mind" stages as listed here and clarified here. From there, most people seem to get stuck, because such a state is incredibly sublime and it is hard to imagine that there is any imperfection in it, even tho to outsiders it sounds ridiculous as people like Sai Baba claim to be God, claim to grow their infinite power each day and so forth. Would God listen to a human being (like Buddha) who tells him that he is actually delusional and in reality he is nobody?

Thus, if you are thinking of breaking open your mind with psychedelics, I ask you to please save yourself a great deal of suffering and delusional thinking and not do so unless a) you already have developed right view of No Self/automatic perfection, and b) you do not have manic/bipolar tendencies in your family.

I do think that psychedelics can be useful catalysts to removing all doubt about the Buddha Dharma, but only once Right View is firmly established (please do the dialog at LiberationUnleashed.com for an introduction to this No Self understanding). And even then, I don't think they are necessary, because with intense effort and desire, one can achieve the state of No Self/No Mind and even cosmic consciousness (which is separate and almost unrelated), just from following the meditation instructions I've posted.



Perhaps the main problem with psychedelics, and even cosmic consciousness states, is that the mind states are so far away from our everyday experience that it makes liberation seem something very difficult to achieve permanently. That is why Buddha tried to show people how to stop suffering right here, right now, in the midst of ordinary everyday life and perception. His advice to Bahiya is exemplary of that.

In fact, it makes sense that psychedelic states would not be conducive to understanding the dependently originated nature of reality, because to do so requires logically examining direct, ordinary experience and the causes & conditions associated with it.