Oohhh.... now I have to google FRATER PERDURABO!
I enjoyed your answers very much. Your experience seems to be very different from my own and I find this difference fascinating. I think (and this is, of course, just my perception) that you would benefit greatly if you start guiding here in this forum. Having to consider these subjects from apparent other points of view is a wonderful way to see through ours. And I think you have what it takes to be a good guide too.
Here are the last 3 questions:
4) What was the last bit that pushed you over, made you look?
5) Describe decision, intention, free will, choice and control. What makes things happen? How does it work? What are you responsible for? Give examples from experience.
6) Anything to add?
4) I didn't do anything. "I" can't do anything. Experience in totality is the only doer and experience is highly conditioned, so generally runs according to tendencies, like a set of programs.
Experience in totality may drop ideas, programs, or patterns into play; such as the "meditation model of liberation", or the Paul Hedderman model of reality, or the Tony Parsons model of reality, or the "alcoholic" meme, or the "am i enlightened" meme, or any other conceptual construct, idea, or meme, creating the framework for the appearance of "progress" or "growth" or "learning".
There was an appearance that was sometimes interpreted as "doing", but it was all an illusion. Nothing pushed me over, because there is no true "me" to be pushed over. If reality in totality manifests a "me" it does it. There is nothing "I" can do about it as an apparent separate identity. Reality as a whole is the only doer.
5) The words you asked me to describe are all only appearances or interpretations of what is happening. They are only concepts. Nothing to do with what's happening other than as an interpretation of what's happening within what's happening. Neither "free will" or "predetermination" are true, yet both are true. Same goes for all the other words. They are false dichotomies that only exist conceptually. Are all polarities only apparent?
6) Yeah. FRATER PERDURABO is a complex conceptual construct that exists in our experience fields. From the available wrtings, it's evident that he was Self-realised. For example:
OLYMPAS. What thought is worthy?
MARSYAS. Truly none
Save one, in that it is but one.
Keep the mind constant; thou shalt see
Ineffable felicity.
Increase the will, and thou shalt find
It hath the strength to be resigned.
Resign the will; and from the string
Will's arrow shall have taken wing,
And from the desolate abode
Found the immaculate heart of God!
...
OLYMPAS. Then all life's loyal breath
Is a waste wind. All joy forgone,
I must strive ever?
MARSYAS.
Cease to strive!
Destroy this partial I, this moan
Of an hurt beast! Sores keep alive
By scratching. Health is peace. Unknown
And unexpressed because at ease
Are the Most High Congruities.
OLYMPAS. Then death is thine “attainment”? I
Can do no better than to die!
MARSYAS.
Indeed, that “I” that is not God
Is but a lion in the road!
Knowest thou not (even now!) how first
The fetters of Restriction burst?
In the rapture of the heart
Self hath neither lot nor part.
...
The hostile thoughts, the evil things!
They hover on majestic wings,
Like vultures waiting for a man
To drop from the slave-caravan!
MARSYAS.
All thoughts are evil. Thought is two:
The seer and the seen. Eschew
That supreme blasphemy, my son,
Remembering that God is One.
OLYMPAS. God is a thought!
MARSYAS. The “thought” of God
Is but a shattered emerod:
A plague, an idol, a delusion,
Blasphemy, schism, and confusion!
OLYMPAS Banish my one high thought? The night
Indeed were starless.
MARSYAS Very right!
But that impalpable inane
Is the condition of success;
Even as earth lies black to gain
Spring's green and autumn's fruitfulness.
...
Knowledge is but experience
Made conscious of itself. The bee,
Past master of geometry,
Hath not one word of all of it;
For wisdom is not mother-wit!
So the adept is called insane
For his frank failure to explain.
Language creates false thoughts; the true
Breed language slowly. Following
Experience of a thing we knew
Arose the need to name the thing.
So, ancients likened a man's mind
To the untamed evasive wind.
Some fool thinks names are things; and boasts
Aloud of spirits and of ghosts.
Religion follows on a pun!
And we, who know that Holy One
Of whom I told thee, seek in vain
Figure or word to make it plain.
OLYMPAS Despair of man!
MARSYAS Man is the seed
Of the unimaginable flower.
By singleness of thought and deed
It may bloom now–this actual hour!
...
MARSYAS Though calm and pure
It seem, maybe some thought hath crept
Into his mind to baulk the adept.
The expectation of success
Suffices to destroy the stress
Of the one thought. But then, what odds?
“Man's vision goes, dissolves in God's;”
Or, “by God's grace the Light is given
To the elected heir of heaven. “
These are but idle theses, dry
Dugs of the cow Theology.
Business is business. The one fact
That we know is: the gods exact
A stainless mirror. Cleanse thy soul!
Perfect the will's austere control!
For the rest, wait!
The sky once clear,
Dawn needs no prompting to appear!
OLYMPAS Enough! it shall be done.
MARSYAS Beware!
Easily trips the big word “dare. “
Each man's an OEdipus, that thinks
He hath the four powers of the Sphinx,
Will, Courage, Knowledge, Silence. Son,
Even the adepts scarce win to one!
Thy Thoughts–they fall like rotten fruits.
But to destroy the power that makes
These thoughts–thy Self? A man it takes
To tear his soul up by the roots!
This is the mandrake fable, boy!
OLYMPAS You told me that the Path was joy.
MARSYAS A lie to lure thee!
OLYMPAS Master!
MARSYAS
Pain
And joy are twin toys of the brain.
Even early visions pass beyond!
OLYMPAS
Not all the crabbed runes I have conned
Told me so plain a truth. I see,
Inscrutable Simplicity!
Crushed like a blind-worm by the heel
Of all I am, perceive, and feel,
My truth was but the partial pang
That chanced to strike me as I sang.
******* *******
It has many more gems, and continues here:
https://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib242
Crowley has a flair for the dramatic, and has been called all sorts, not least by himself. His essay on the Mahasattipatana is one of many superb works. Do What Thou Wilt with him.
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It's all said here, as good as anyone can say it:
You don't exist... That is, as an ego. When you understand that, you're liberated.
-- Alan Watts
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The mind has got a gun to your head, only because you think you have a head to put a gun to it.
-- Mooji
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Beyond that, I found we’ve actually been deluding ourselves in the worst way of all by believing in the individual.
Stay with me on this.
Kafka, Orwell, Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.. everyone told us The Individual was the most important thing we could be.
Everyone is fucking ‘quirky’ these days; every shit in their window of MTV is ‘quirky’. Everyone’s cool; everyone’s smart… it’s not true.
What if the individual was the fake? What if the individual’s the crock? And we’ve actually been sold that by “them”; by the man, the establishment.. whatever you want.
Because what occurred to me is that when you talk about the individual, and you deal with the individual, you find that the end of the individual is neurosis. To be individual means that there is “self” and “not self”. Okay?
So where I stop.. the boundaries of “me”, right, this physical body; the boundaries of me that stretch out.. things I believe in.. I’m sure we’d all be friends if we talked – but would we be friends with Newt Gingrich? No.
But that’s the point: I stop, where Newt Gingrich starts. Why is that? Why do I stop there? Why does *he* define my self-sense? And I can’t absorb him?
Why do these fuckers.. why does the Skull And Bones Society, or the CIA.. why do the 33º Masons – why are they different from us?
They’re not – they want to explain things. They want an answer.
They’ve found an answer that seems to suit them – which seems kind of uncool and cruel to me, because it involves exploiting other people.
But they’re looking for an answer. We’re all looking for the same thing: Why. Are. We. Here?
-- Grant Morrison, Disinfo Con
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Physical death does not resolve the fatal problem of the ego. Only the psychological death of the “I” can resolve the problem of human pain. However, the “I” loves itself too much and does not want to die whatsoever. As long as the “I” exists, the wheel of Samsara (the fatal wheel of human tragedy) will turn.
-- Samael Aun Weor, Revolution of the Dialectic
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Only by ridding ourselves of self-esteem, only by having the mind free of assumptions, can we experience, in the absence of the “I,” that which is the truth.
-- Samael Aun Weor, Revolution of the Dialectic
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Subhuti, do not say that the Buddha has the idea, ‘I will lead all sentient beings to Nirvana.’ Do not think that way, Subhuti. Why?
In truth there is not one single being for the Buddha to lead to Enlightenment.
If the Buddha were to think there was, he would be caught in the idea of a self, a person, a living being, or a universal self.
Subhuti, what the Buddha calls a self essentially has no self in the way that ordinary persons think there is a self.
Subhuti, the Buddha does not regard anyone as an ordinary person. That is why he can speak of them as ordinary persons.
-- Diamond Sutra
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I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I יְהוָה do all these things.
-- Isaiah 45:7
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Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of god should be made manifest in him
-- John 9:3
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The self that you are trying to improve does not exist.
-- Mooji
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Since there is no self, there is also no other.
-- Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
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If you are asked what is the difference between the mind of the truly perfected Buddha and the mind of sentient beings of the three realms, it is nothing other than the difference between realising and not realizing the nature of mind.
-- Padmasambhava
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The mind's contents are less real than the reflection a bird attacks in the smoked glass window, and yet we wage imaginary wars between the projections we call "us" and the ones we call "them," but they are both observed by the same one.
-- Michael Paradis
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"I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek."
"What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself."
-- Alan Watts
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Clarity does not provide answers; it dissolves questions.
-- Wu Hsin
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"But we tend to CARE what happens to us, and want things to go a certain way... That’s due to an investment in an imaginary incomplete self-image.
We have a deep, maybe unconscious belief that we are a certain way, that we live in a world that is a certain way, a sort of cartoon we carry around in our mind, imagining that we’re incomplete."
-- Peter Brown
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pratitya samutpada:
Know, the sane spirit keeps its course
By this, that everything it thinks
Hath causal or contingent links.
Destroy them, and destroy the mind!
O bestial, bottomless, and blind
Black pit of all insanity!
The adept must make his way to thee!
This is the end of all our pain,
The dissolution of the brain!
For lo! in this no mortar sticks;
Down come the house–a hail of bricks!
-- Frater Perdurabo, Aha!
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If you pass beyond form, O friends, it is Paradise and rose-gardens within rose-gardens.
When thou hast broken and destroyed thine own form, thou hast learned to break the form of everything.
-- Rumi
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Yoga of the Yellow Dragon:
"Balance against each thought its exact opposite. For the marriage of these is the annihilation of illusion."
-- Frater Perdurabo
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Turn thy face towards thine own Face: thou hast no kinsman but thyself.
-- Rumi
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Seeing that you cannot control your mind you realize there is no controller.
What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts.
What you took to be the feeler of the feelings is just one of the feelings.
What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just a part of the experience.
-- Alan Watts
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Heartbreak is the end of innocence; the realization that this world does not belong to you, but that you belong to it.
-- Joseph Campbell
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"You" are not doing "You."
"You" are BEING done.
Liberation/causeless peace is seeing that "you" have never done anything.
"You" is an idea, a mental abstraction, a semi-persistent phantom.
When you look directly for it, it cannot be found.
-- Michael Jeffreys
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Seeing that you cannot control your mind you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings is just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience is just a part of the experience.
There is not any thinker of thoughts or feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because our language has a grammatical rule that states that verbs must have subjects. The funny thing about this is that verbs are processes, and so are subjects and nouns, which are supposed to be things.
How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it cannot, but we always insist that there is this subject called the knower, and without a knower there cannot be knowing. However, that is just a grammatical rule, not a rule of nature. In nature there is just knowing."
-- Alan Watts
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"We build these elaborate stories in imagination and then we identify with them, we think we’re IN these stories, and then we think we’re STUCK in those stories.
Once you see that all the elements that your story is made of don’t actually exist as objective realities in the way you think they do, then your whole story collapses; and where does that leave you?
You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you are; but then there’s nothing to trap you, and no you to be trapped. THIS is liberation."
--Peter Brown
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So the idea we have of who we are, is suffering from experiencing the ideas it has about itself.
-- Mooji
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Ignorance, the belief that things are real, is extremely powerful. But we should remember that it is nothing more than a mistake; it is merely a misunderstanding that we cling to but which in fact has no foundation whatsoever. It's opposite, the understanding that phenomena have no reality, is based on a consistent truth that stands up to all argument.
If one familiarises oneself with this understanding, it can be developed indefinitely, since it is both true and a natural quality of the mind. As it develops and grows more powerful, it acts as the antidote to the erroneous belief that things are real, which is bound to become correspondingly weaker."
-- Dalai Lama, A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night
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Even if one is the most sinful of all sinners, one shall yet cross over the ocean of sin by the raft of Self-knowledge alone. As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes; similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all bonds of karma to ashes...
-- Krishna, Bhagavad-Gita 4:36-37
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"This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real."
-- Rumi
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Physical death does not resolve the fatal problem of the ego. Only the psychological death of the “I” can resolve the problem of human pain. However, the “I” loves itself too much and does not want to die whatsoever. As long as the “I” exists, the wheel of Samsara (the fatal wheel of human tragedy) will turn.
-- Samael Aun Weor, Revolution of the Dialectic
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One can release all desire to seek, and realize that the thought that there is anything else but God is a baseless vanity.
This is the same vanity that claims authorship for one's experiences, thoughts, and actions.
With reflection, it can be seen that both the body and the mind are the result of the innumerable conditions of the universe, and that one is at best the witness of this concordance.
-- David Hawkins
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fin