New here.

[Drew]

Greetings friends. I am new to buddhist medditative practice, new to this site.
Please undersand I have no conceptions of the vernacular.

I wish to relate a personal experience (as indescribable as the words are, I will attempt) and to receive your guidance.

13 years ago, I was 29 and 3 weeks from being married to my college girlfiend of 9 years, when she decided to break off the engagement. In the weeks that followed I had many deep meditative experiences. In one, which I still remember vividly, I let go of any judgments and effort of thoughts about "me", I had run out of tears and ego attachments. With feelings still present in my gut, constructions and concepts were released, and my mind was freed of thought. It was not a dream or a trance. My body was still, but I was not my body. My mind was still, and I was not my mind. My feelings remained, but they were not attached to mind. I felt a profound love and appreciation for the very gut feelings. The judments about them and their meanings were dropped. In this expereicence, I did not mark the passage of time, so I cannot tell you if I was lying still in empty mind for one hour or many hours.

When I rose, it was as if my perspective on life had shifted and the illusions of mental constructions were clear. I then began to experience myself in the world in an entirely different manner, and many illusions of thought and mind have been revealed. In particular, the relationship to emotions have been transformed and in a sense detached from prior constructed meanings. I have carried this new perspective and an emotional contentment for human capacity with me ever since.

I have read the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi and practiced self-enquiry and these resonated with my experience without formal instruction, and I have recently discovered the complimentary and beautiful teachings of the same truth of no self presented by Rinpoche Anam Thubten. These also resonate very deeply with me, and his words are so well tuned to my core truth of experience.

In a sense, I would like to understand what this transformative experience of mind is called in the buddhist vernacular. Also, my family now includes four young beautiful teachers now. And as they are growing through life, making choices and having experiences, I would like to find a place to introduce and educate them to the illusions and fundamental truths of our existence in a way that gets to the heart of the matter of being human, enjoying that human-ness within the oneness of all, and a practice of compassionate being.

Thank you for your time and thoughtful suggestions. I am pleased to provide clarification to the extent I can.

[Drew]

There is a wonderful emptiness in 32 views and no comments.

How about a direct question then:

Do you think Buddha needed to come to the point of experiencing suffering himself in order to have his revelation that suffering was self-created and liberation was available at any moment? Is suffering and then liberating oneself therefrom the direct path to experience what the Buddha experienced?

It is interesting that venus rising at dawn is described at the moment. Venus at dawn, the herald of daylight is also called Lucifer. The “Morning Star”, which was also a moniker given to Jesus. Revelations 22:16, if you care (and I suspect, you don’t). The idea that the character of lucifer has been so misunderstood, literally misinterpreted from Hebrew to Latin, and then ensconced within the king James version of the biblical text makes this metaphor of truth so delicious with paradox.

It is a very curious phenomenon that we cannot see the electromagnetic spectrum of light unless it comes to us on the proper angle. We rely on reflection, refraction, scattering, and we typically have the perceptive illusion of confusing reflective, refractive or scattering objects as the "source" of light.

We can know that light makes its invisible journey as it travels through the ether always radiatiating infinitely outward from the source. Imagine you are a space traveller, in orbit around our planet, the ether is very dark and clear, the sun itself is hiding behind the earth (or perhaps you are hiding from the sun behind the earth). Suddenly, a full moon is in view reflecting the brighness of the sun so brilliantly. The moon basks in the glory of the sun’s power, and scatters and reflects that glory for you to behold the fiction of moon light.

And yet more glorious still, is the emptiness of darkness. For when you turn your head away from the moon, toward the darkest blackness of deepest space punctuated only by the pinpoints of direct light from distant stars, you see not the light passing by in the darkness. Yet, you know, for certain truth, the light must be travelling there always. It must cross the ether in its journey from the sun to the moon. Otherwise, how did the visible spectrum of electromagnetism arrive to land upon it the moon and write the fiction called moonlight? So it can be known: the glorious light is always present within the invisible darkness.

Bioluminescent creatures release their own light energy by producing the chemical luciferin and the enzyme luciferase. Every organism’s bioluminescence is unique in wavelength, duration, timing, and regularity of flashes. Get this: All cells. Yours and mine! Produce some form of bioluminescence within the electromagnetic spectrum, but most are neither visible nor noticeable to the naked eye.

So the light is always within you, just as it was within the Buddha - just as it travels in the darkness invisible and indivisible.

Any one of us may experience the light within the glorious emptiness and allow our own light to scatter and relflect, so that others may see your glow.

So, I share this paradox of truth with you this morning, in the darkeness always present there is light, from without and from within.

Your venus can rise at any time to reflect the light of truth from within, nothing external is required.

[catmoon]

Do you think Buddha needed to come to the point of experiencing suffering himself in order to have his revelation that suffering was self-created and liberation was available at any moment? Is suffering and then liberating oneself therefrom the direct path to experience what the Buddha experienced?

The Buddha did spend considerable time in ascetic practice. It's hard to see how he could have done this without suffering. But after enlightenment, it is important to note that he did not advocate such practice. So I would answer no, at least in the context of ascetic practice.