Spiritual Enlightenment: How to Awaken to What is True

Hi everyone. In this post, I wanted to share one of the most effective spiritual practices for awakening.

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This practice rests on the principles of

1- Craving is the innate desire and aversion for things to be different than how they currently unfold.

The sense of being a self is reinforced primarily by craving.

2- The only truly satisfying state is the one that has no craving of any form.

3- Impermanence (in this sense, the changing nature of sensations) can be observed in all modalities of pleasure, neutrality and pain with clarity in order to reduce the immediate cause of suffering which is craving and self-clinging.

The stable perception of sensations slowly dissolve. Initially, this is traumatic but the more you accept that this is the case, the less suffering will eventually arise.

4- The use of jhanic factors like happiness and joy allow for deeper and more consistent investigation into reality. While knowing the impermanent nature of these sensations, they still allow for a more effective and accurate spiritual investigation.

5- When the conditions are ideal (with the above principles), doing self enquiry clarifies the innate sense of being a self and allow for the deepest recesses of your unconscious mind to re-write their false innate programming.

The result is a direct experience of seeing the illusion we all live under: The self is one mind/body, enduring in time and space, separate from everything else.

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The Practice Steps:

1- You start your practice by slowly increasing the power of awareness. The usual jhanic factors like joy and happiness arise with stable attention and strong metacognitive awareness.

2- Slowly, you start to observe the changing sensations that arise moment by moment. There is nothing overly advanced about this instruction. Make sure to observe there are MORE arising and passing aways in all objects and the usual stability we experience with ‘states’ and objects (breath, body etc.) are much more fickle and moving than we normally perceive. Do this in open awareness but with momentary concentration.

 – Note: This mode of perception is rawer processing of binding moments of consciousness. The part of your brain which constructs ‘things’ out of processes is temporarily disabled.

3- Now, use this perception of impermanence to significantly reduce your desire for pleasant sensations and aversion for unpleasant sensations. Initiate this perception by noticing how the medium of sensations are all changing, somewhat vibrating rather than solid and stable objects. In all pleasant, neutral or unpleasant sensations. Your alertness and clarity of mind needs to be higher than the sober state of consciousness to be able to tune into it.

Realize that you don’t have to pursue or run away from sensations which constantly change in each moment. Impute less of ‘wanting’ to the conscious experience.

4- Now, pour all of your investigation and energy into this experience of craving in open awareness. This innate feeling that things need to be different than how they unfold to be satisfied. 

Remind your mind that to reduce suffering, all you have to do is to reduce your desire and aversion for things to be different than what they are. The only satisfying state is the one where there is no craving.

Tune into what you experience and train the mind to FULLY accept all sensations and open up to them.

You’ll experience a different state of consciousness compared to your usual resistance paradigm.

Unless this shift occurs noticeably, you’ll need to continue investigating what exactly you are not allowing to exist and let go of that. (ex. pain in your legs, a sense of boredom, not wanting to see sensations in detail and wanting to stabilize, wanting for more joy and pleasure to spread the body than whatever exists right now etc.)

5- With the  heightened understanding of reduced craving and seeing more of the detail and impermanence of objects in conscious experience, now move to the final piece of the puzzle: Self inquiry.

Since craving reinforces self-clinging, we are now in an incredible state of mind to see the self as it is.

Ask the question: Who am I?

Allow the unconscious mind to feel a particular tug in awareness. A release of further resistance of how things are will occur as self perception reduces. Then it will re-group as a block of resistance. Ask the question again to release it again.

You need to feel SIGNIFICANT equanimity rising and SIGNIFICANT resistance dropping. If this is not happening, go back to the previous step and do the non-craving process again.

Try to maintain this level of reduced craving and allow for the unconscious mind to re-program to its deepest parts. 

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When you close your eyes, feel the burden of being a separate self dissolving and your self-boundaries getting less stable with ‘Who am I?’

When you open your eyes, defocus your eyes and resist the urge to make objects out of processes and see the interconnectedness of everything in a state of open awareness. Resist the urge for attention to contract on objects like TV screen, floor, house, breat, body etc. 

When you maintain this investigation for as long as you’ve intended, complete your practice by resolving to replicate this perception as often as possible in daily life.

DONE!

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Let me know your thoughts about the practice and share your own practices. 

Feel free to ask questions.

Much love,

Arda

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