The Modernized Buddhist Path to Freedom
These days we need to start with inner-child self-love 😊💕🙏🏿🙏
Perhaps “you” came here because somewhere in the back of “your” mind, the thought arose, “Do I really exist?” Well, buckle up, because we will delve into that question in minute. But first, I invite you to gently tune in to your heart chakra… so that you can join me in avoiding spiritual bypassing. Let's start with some inner-child re-parenting, and then you can move on to outward loving-kindness (metta) meditation as taught by Buddha, Jesus, etc.
What Buddha did not know, is that in our day, people would actually hate themselves (while in his day, he felt that everyone loved themselves). This means that before you can even do outward loving kindness meditation, you need to send love to your inner child and re-parent yourself on a continuous basis (not just 10 minutes in the mornings). But, catch-22, if you never felt real love from your parents, you probably cannot love your inner child. So, in this case, you may need some help:
You can receive love from surrender to a higher power, or you can feel it possibly by getting a cute little pet. Some people begin to feel it when they have their first baby. Some people feel it when they fall deeply in love with a romantic partner (which can also lead to painful heartbreak, but as Rumi said, you must keep breaking your heart until it remains open). Loveyhuasca can also be very helpful for feeling a connection to divine love.
If you do not bring the light of awareness and love to your darkness (shadow work) and heal your inner child traumas, any other spiritual transcendence you do will become a form of spiritual bypassing, which will turn you into an egotistical asshole like Sadhguru, Teja Anand, or Artem Boytsov. You can tell when you are listening to fake gurus because their answers to questions are flippantly self-righteous, due to their own avoidance of their feelings. They continually talk from the perspective of some ultimate reality and then denigrate anyone who "doesn't get it." Sadhguru even mentioned in one video that anyone who follows him is an idiot, and his followers lapped that up. On the other hand, more genuine “non-gurus” like my friend Eshwar, will explain their own tortuous personal path to awakening, in which shadow work was 99% of the journey. That tortuous path is summed up nicely in this insta vid:
But Who Am I?
Now that you are fairly healed up and happy from the metta meditation, one might begin to ask some deeper questions. What is the point of life? Do we just live and then die? Are we just here to have a good time and that's it? These questions are absolutely critical to know the answer to.
If we just live and die and that's it (no rebirth) then we can solve all problems with a bullet to the head (or parties?). But, there is a huge mountain of evidence that this is not the case (perplexity). Whatever suffering you experience now is only an infinitesimal amount compared to what "you" have experienced before in other lives and what "you" will experience in future lives until "you" realize that you don't exist.
The most common first step on the path is actually a misstep: thinking or feeling that we are all One Universal Mind (God). That's a simple trick the ego plays when you try to dissolve it: grow to the size of the universe so it can't be found easily. I have a blog post mostly about this.
Remember: Don't fall down the psychedelic/mind rabbit hole: Addiction to meaning-creation is the essence of psychosis. Buuut, here is the best psychedelic recipe.
Note: If you are a father/mother/spouse, please take it slow with realizing you don't exist, for the sake of your family. Be here for them.
How does one become enlightened?
Following the Noble Eightfold Path will awaken self-assumed "beings" into the empty disjoint perfect infinite flows of Nibbana (nature as it truly is, not from any unified perspective), based on the Pali canon suttas. I have a simple meditation video here that can help you feel a little bit of nibbana immediately.
Ironically, most Buddhists end up going to hell, according to Ayasma Aggacitta from Sasanarakkha Buddhist Sanctuary, while most Christians go to heaven, according to his study of Near Death Experiences, because Buddha's teaching of no self is too difficult for people to grasp, and so they end up just being fearful of rebirth and sin.
So, I try to be a bit careful with explaining Buddha's teaching of conditions only to the people who are ready for that. Even Ayasma Aggacitta doesn't understand nibbana. I visited his principal disciple, Ayasma Ariyadhammika, and taught him real buddhism. He didn't even understand the meaning of Conditions. Yet he claims to teach Buddhist monks advanced Buddhist studies. This world is funny.
Right View
Right View is a key pillar of the Eightfold Path. We must continually refine our view based on seeing reality as it is before we superimpose identity onto it. The old habit of identification is a hard one to break completely, but there's no time like the present to start breaking it. The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination are a useful tool to gaining Right View.
Remember, everything happens perfectly automatically (and disjointly) in this universe; there is nobody here. Whatever happens is simply happening, or not, with nobody that it is happening to. Suffering/stress is inherent in the cycle of birth/death due to identification with the dream of existence. The dream of existence happens due to ignorance of the disjoint reality (see Bahiya sutta), leading to a "binding up" (or contact, phassa in Pali) of all sensations into One Awareness, which, unfortunately, most gurus teach to be the ultimate truth.
The point is to "hang up the phone" on identity and the experiences identified with, including psychedelic/healing experiences, so that one is not reborn after death, and the illusion of unified conscious awareness is overcome.
Additional Resources
www.liberationunleashed.com is a place where folks will help you to realize the no-self nature of reality. This is the first step (intellectual understanding). These folks also have a facebook group which is not something I recommend due to their confusion after passing thru the first realization. My nibbana e-book is more to the point.
If you are interested in meditation for samadhi purposes, I recommend watching videos by Ajahn Brahm on how to do (hindu) jhana meditation, focusing on the breath, but be warned that those hindu-style jhanic states do not liberate you from samsara. The jhanas that Buddha taught were mostly not about focusing but rather relaxing and letting go of identity illusion.
These books are also excellent guideposts:
What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula. Free online. Best book I've found so far explaining Buddha's teachings conceptually. No good explanation of nibbana tho.
Sam Harris's book, "Waking Up," is perhaps more useful for some beginners, as he comes from a neuroscience perspective, and has Chapter 1 posted free. It's also available as a free audio book if you sign up for the Audible.com free trial. Sam is not Buddhist tho ... Yet.
And you can join my TherapyCircle group on Signal messenger to connect with other like-minded folks. If interested, reach out to me!
∞ blessings of peace, love, and liberation∞
Nobody, aka Joel
How and when did you realise nibbhana, what happened then ?
How to get the book you writed, is there any translated version ?