Are you us?

I'm happy just to sit here, wait for the bite of the fog outside to be excised as the door closes and the people mover whisks us on its way.

Happy to scan a few pages before el soporifico hits like a pacific front. Warm, unrelenting; washes over me and blankets me in a soft sheath of stupor, taking me to

..eh

what's that?

Odd conversation happening next to me.

I drift nonetheless

To the sweet spot, glassed between two layers of consciousness, almost dreaming but with the slightest of grips on the top pane of glass and then

plunk

there.

Plates above and below have fogged in, but there's light coming through, suggests not a very long trip down here and I must be hungry because it's all about ribs.

This is isn't id here, this is the little brain talking. GI juices must be rumbling back on the other side of the glass because all I can think about is

..how long to boil these puppies. And the juxtapositions begin. Geometry of dreams; shapes and shadows overlapping and contraindicating and challenging and diffusing together. And there, being pushed out of the wall in a perfect wife-size profile she comes and now we're

talking

How long again? Wouldn't it be easier to braise these in the oven or even barbecue them...boiling seems so Dahmner like and the smell. I love meat dear, you know that, but sometimes the smell can

But dreams have geometry, they also have their own linguistics so it comes out something like

thought word thought thought word

and ultimately comes out as something like "purple", which somehow captures the meaning, intent, undercurrents and fluorescence of the whole dialogue

Which now segues without a pause to the new family member. How long should we keep her separate in her room ("red"); is she eating enough "yokel" wonder if she has had her shots (thought).

Dreams are at once unilateral and non-hierarchical, another paradox for another day. But it comes to bear in THIS dream as it our relationship transferred to the subtle realm, so there's collaboration and back and forth but utlimately I pull the shots here - nobody else can except maybe for that lady looking down from the glass plate she has a cord she's somehow dangled through, odd, solid through solid, but this is sopor land and the next things blur into continuity, the subtle realm and the gross realm destroying opposites as they couple and twist as I pull the chord and

eyes are opening. Nice train. Warm train. fog gone. But she is still talking to her other half, who sounds a lot like mine, given the context of the conversation. She's finishing up with their new pet now, about to say cloistered goodbye without a lot of vociferous love-yous, a lot like me, pointing me again the to ultimate impersonal nature of most of our very human transactions.

Cohen, for all the edges I can't seem to get over, does have that one NAILED. Fear, anger, depression, love, they're the same between all of us - just different degrees of intensity.

And with that thought threading and wrapping around the mists her conversation wound around me, I'm off to nappy land again

shuka.

Shift.

Greg Goode has given about as fine an explanation of enlightenment as I have ever come across. Which I will now promptly screw up, through paraphrasing. In essence, enlightenment is establishing the non-difference between enlightenment and non-enlightenment.

Now this might seem like semantic chuff, but it actually encapsulates the whole enchilada from a non-dual perspective. To whit:

Wanting to be enlightened presupposes that you are not. Two states. You are unenlightened, and somebody else is enlightened. You want to move from your state to their state. Thing is, there is only one state.

This can be realized through the realization of truth through pointers:

-You are not your body (you exist in sleep without bodily perceptions per se)
-You are not your mind (you exist in dreamless sleep without mind perceptions)
- All non (non-dual) experiences revolve around self and an other:

This can manifest in happiness (feeling of non separation) and unhappiness (feeling of separation). In either case, there is a subtle duality, which will inevitably lead to suffering. (Happiness based on duality is set-up to fail by its very nature; unhappiness based on duality is, well, suffering and unhappiness).

In duality:

When you are depressed, you want to feel a different way (duality).
When you are angry, you are propelled to feel another way (duality)
When you are happy, you have moved from one feeling to another (duality)

So it can all be boiled down to this: realize what you are not. when it is seen, then realized, that there is no separation, all relative happiness and unhappiness dissolves. you are left as that which is. Awareness, the big fabric without thread count or edge, out of which everything arises from and fades back into.

Which is why Yogananda's prayer of a multi-jetted flame (one flame, split into hundreds of little flames through a stove burner) was such an affecting metaphor.

Which is why the picture I have of space reversed is such an affecting metaphor. (No space between individuals. Negative space, like in drawing. Draw what is not, and the picture appears. See the space between individuals as non-space, and you have a connectedness that we all poke up through. My picture, however weak, is like an eternally large piece of dental-dam, with shapes appearing in and then returning to it).

So. That is enlightenment. Initially you are motivated to find out what is 'wrong' - which points to a world of duality, which needs to be integrated. Non-dual realization identifies this seeming duality, and integrates them. Thing is, after integration, a survey indicates that they were never separated in the first place. Thus, it is seen that there is no difference between enlightenment and non-enlightenment. When this seeing becomes a realization, one is rooted in the absolute, and free. Which was the case all along, right?