Awake: Chapter 4 Notes

there are no actual boundaries anywhere. There are only apparent boundaries.

Highlighted without note. I assume because it sounds like wooshit.

PS I just coined the term wooshit. It's bullshit that uses woo to explain things. It's things like pretending that the universe has a plan for you when you know that it doesn't know or care that you exist and that you're just soothing your terrified ego.

birthright

that word again

unconditional love

puke now or later?

natural reality (how reality is experienced after liberation)

Reminded me of Steve Hagen, not sure why.

This knowing, which is not apart from the knower or the known, excludes nothing and has no boundaries.

Feels like a Steve Hagen paragraph.

Zen is life

Highlighted without note.

…life, just as it is, with no stories.

If it had a voice, it would say, “Here… Here… Here,” and “Now… Now… Now.”

Highlighted without note.

previous experience of being in an enclosed identity somewhere on a timeline

Highlighted without note.

I had no words for it because I couldn’t put my finger on what specifically had changed

Dropped stories.

I suspect that what changes is that we just experience life without wrapping it in stories.

imprisoning paradigm that some things are good, and some things are bad. That paradigm is rooted in the delusion of separation

Inspect this…

Good and bad are stories, not sure what that has to do with separation. I'm kind of inclined to think that just as your brain creates the illusion of separation, it creates the illusion of non-separation after enlightenment. Why would you automatically assume that your post-enlightenment world is any more real than the pre-enlightenment world? You experience both of them in the same consciousness and through the same sensory organs (including the brain which we know makes up a lot of shit). I get the it “feels” more “authentic” and “genuine” but those feeling arise in the same space that the old, false, feelings did. Why think one is more real than the other? More useful perhaps, but is it more real? I'd contend that reality doesn't matter so long as it's more useful.

My heart opened, and I stopped caring

Highlighted without note. Sounds right.

without having to think or worry about what did or didn’t get done.

I will do what I can and I will not do what I can't. And that's fine.

Acceptance.

natural and spontaneous perfection

puke

It's not “perfect”. Perfection implies a story about a right and wrong for a thing to be. This is nonsense. Lose the story and things are the way they are.

Perfection is a judgement.

Ultimately, we realize that suffering ends when we stop trying to end suffering.

Highlighted without note. I assume because it's true.