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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jed McKenna
Read between
February 5 - May 2, 2025
Also by Jed McKenna The Enlightenment Trilogy The trilogy is recommended, but not needed, to enjoy this book. Spiritual Enlightenment The Damnedest Thing Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment Spiritual Warfare
That Which Cannot Be Simpler
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“And what of untruth? Where does that fit in?” “It doesn’t. There can plainly be no such thing as untruth. I don’t pretend to understand it, and I cannot make it fit reality as I see it, but the logic is perfectly sound. It is beyond question that truth is absolute and that untruth does not exist. Untruth cannot be true any more than non-being can be or non-existence can exist.”
“Truth is all, yes. And to say I exist is the same as to say consciousness exists, yes.” “Can you say that anything else exists?” “No. I am quite familiar with the cogito and solipsism and your books, and I have determined this to my complete satisfaction. The only thing I know for certain is that I exist, which is the same as saying that consciousness exists.”
That which cannot be simpler: if Truth is All and Consciousness Exists then Consciousness is All
Here We Go Again
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This Thing You’re Reading
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In scientific terms, if you change your set of assumptions about the universe from Newtonian to Einsteinian, you have made a paradigm shift. In this document, I use paradigm to mean worldview in the broadest possible sense.
I am not a spiritual person and never was, and that, in my view, the search for truth is not a spiritual endeavor and never was. What’s more, the truth is that truth is not really relevant. It has no practical value or realworld application. It doesn’t change or improve anything. I may understand that consensus reality isn’t true, or even probable, but here I am. Truth is outside of all paradigms, but we live inside them.
I don’t think anymore because thinking is the only real weapon of mass destruction, and I don’t need it anymore. I have thought the universe to death.
What I am saying here is not for you to trust or believe, but to look into on your own.
The King of Pointland
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Hammocky Ponderings
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C-Rex, Consciousness is King; the one true, comprehensive, bulletproof, fireproof, idiotproof, geniusproof theory of everything.
“It actually never occurred to me to write about this topic until the science program about a theory of everything. That’s what sparked it. My immediate thought was that the only possible theory of everything is truth, and that I live it. I know everything about it, and I may be one of very few who do, and one of even fewer who are designed for expression. Science uses the term theory of everything in a very non-everything sense, so I’m just appropriating their phrase and elevating it to its fullest rightful meaning.”
Chinatown
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The theory is the easy part. Recompiling personal reality over a period of years or decades is where the real work comes in.
This stuff is really pretty simple, but there are inherent contradictions in the expression of it. This doesn’t reflect on the merit of the ideas being conveyed, but on the trickiness of conveying them.
the best term I ever came up with for the truth realized state is untruth-unrealization, but if I went around calling it that and sticking it in book titles, we’d have been stopped before we started, so we went with enlightenment as an opening gambit
I don’t say I’m enlightened, I say I’m truth-realized, and then point out that enlightenment must mean the same thing or be both inferior and untrue.
There is only consciousness. Whatever exists is merely appearance within consciousness. There is no universe out there, there is no out there at all, there is only the universe in here. There is only consciousness. Anything that tells you otherwise is a belief, and no belief is true.
In U-Rex, nothing makes sense, and the only thing that can ever make sense is that nothing can ever make sense.
"numerous sources were quoting Tertullian, albeit disapprovingly, as having said: ‘I believe, because it is impossible’. The philosopher John Locke thus makes reference to this new version of the paradox in his classic An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), …" https://aeon.co/ideas/i-believe-because-it-is-absurd-christianitys-first-meme
Unlike any other model or theory of reality, C-Rex requires no belief or faith. C-Rex is what’s left when belief and faith are gone. Stake life upon truth and this is where you go. There is nowhere else. There is no other truth to realize, no other enlightenment. This is where real Zen gets you. This is where asking Who am I? gets you. This is where Spiritual Autolysis gets you. This is Done.
.Ira
C-Rex isn’t just another theory, it’s the enlightened perspective, and anyone who awakens from the dreamstate will call it home. C-Rex is a no-belief-required proposition. You can believe it, I suppose, and you can certainly disbelieve it, but the thing that sets it apart from any and every other theory or model is that it is directly knowable and self-verifiable without the need for any doctrine or dogma, intermediary or intercessor. You don’t have to believe it, you just have to stop working so hard not to. This is beyond popular ideas about spiritual development. The old maps and vehicles
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Yes, C-Rex is extremely falsifiable. It’s so delicate that the tiniest dustmote could smash it to bits. We just have to prove that the dustmote exists and C-Rex is destroyed. All we have to do is prove anything exists and we’re done here, but it can’t be done. There is no objective reality, there is no proof of a physical universe, and nothing can be proven. The C-Rex model is supremely falsifiable, but it cannot be falsified.
Consciousness Defined
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Consciousness is the union of perceiver-perception-perceived. The three are one, no one part stands alone. Without a perceiver, there can be no perception and nothing can be perceived. Without perception, nothing is perceived, so there is no perceiver. Without the perceived, there is no perception and no perceiver. All three must exist together to exist at all. They are one, not three, and the one thing they are is consciousness.
Untrue Atmanic doesn’t arise from true Brahmanic, because untruth does not exist. There is only truth. Brahmanic Consciousness is our absolute nature, Atmanic Consciousness is our living reality. Consciousness is true, the contents of consciousness are not.
Brahmanic Consciousness is not just true, it’s truth.
I Am is the alpha and omega of knowledge. Nothing else is known or knowable by any conscious entity, anywhere, ever. I Am is the absolute universal constant of knowledge, and there is no other absolute universal constant of anything.
There are no consciousness experts, and there is no conscious entity in existence or imagination that can know more than I Am. No god or alien or inhabitant of higher planes could know more. Any possessor of I-Am/Consciousness is the equal of any other. There is no greater authority on consciousness than a conscious being, and no one knows more about yours than you. You don’t have to earn consciousness, you don’t have to go to school or church for it. You are it, it is you.
If you understand that consciousness is what consciousness is conscious of, then you know all there is to know. Any further progress is entirely a matter of decluttering your consciousness by neutralizing emotionally empowered wrong-knowing – ego.
I-Am/Consciousness is just another way of saying Atmanic/Brahmanic Consciousness. The I-Am part is Atmanic Consciousness, and the Consciousness part is Brahmanic Consciousness. Before the foreslash is self you as you know yourself, and after the foreslash is the truth of you, no-self, which is timeless and undifferentiated and all that. So the good news is, yes, you are immortal in consciousness, but no, the you you think of as you, is not.
The God of the Bible, when asked who he was, answered “I Am that I Am”. That would be a pretty good answer from you or me, but it identifies this respondent as not-God. A true God must be synonymous with truth and the infinite – Brahmanic Consciousness – which doesn’t speak or participate or identify itself as a finite inhabitant of the dreamstate.
Energy, matter, bananas, sound, water, whimsy, ethnicity, light, life, two hands clapping, anything you care to name, anything you think you know, will shimmer like a mirage and disappear as soon as you really look at it, because everything that exists within consciousness is a mirage.
Consciousness is true, but what consciousness is conscious of is not, just as a screen might be solid and the projected images not.
No element of a dream is any more or less real than any other, the only valid distinction to be drawn is between dreamer and dream.
It’s not that right-knowing moves in, but that wrong-knowing moves out. No good new knowledge rushes in to fill the void left when bad old knowledge rushes out. It’s not that I think I’m the same as all I perceive, it would simply never occur to me to think otherwise. I don’t perceive artificial distinctions, and there are no real distinctions. Of course it’s all one, it’s all consciousness.
Mysterium Non Tremendum
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Once we understand, at least in theory, that all knowledge is belief and that no belief is true, then ridding ourselves of beliefs becomes a straightforward matter of illuminating them and taking away their shadowy power. This is essentially the awakening process. Go through this process to the end, a strange and lonely place called Done, and you will return to a new universe that works in new ways, which makes sense and can be understood, which is responsive and can be interacted with, and which cannot, in any meaningful way, be distinguished from self.
Ultimately, we’re all afloat on a shoreless sea and no place is any better or worse than another. We want to paddle, though, to move, and Maya has been kind enough to surround us in the illusion of otherness so we can feel discontent with where we are and desire to be somewhere else. We can never understand Maya, but we must be grateful to her. Where would we be without her?
The Story of Markandeya
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The No-Paradox Paradox
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God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. Paul Valéry
I’m trying to figure out if Advaita Vedanta or Bishop Berkeley or anyone else has this C-Rex business sufficiently covered already, or if I should really write a book about it.
“Oh, well, as usual, the assumptions are false, which is probably the better lesson of the question than the answer, which you already know. Consciousness does not exist in time, and since consciousness is all, there’s really no alternative to it. There is no such thing as not-consciousness, or other-than-consciousness. That which exists in truth cannot also not exist in truth. Would you ask how the infinite arises from the finite? The true from the false? The real from the unreal? Poof! Question destroyed, mystery solved. Any others?”
“The difficulty comes from trying to make what I’m saying fit in with what you know, but you can’t because what you know isn’t right.”
They don’t instantly burst into enlightenment. The Zen guys really have a corner on that whole instant bursting thing.
Mountains & Rabbit-Holes
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Once all emotionally empowered wrong-knowing is removed, nothing forever is what remains. Nothing forever is real reality and this, where you are right now, is virtual reality. Transitioning from that second part and settling into the third takes, in my experience, around ten years. Then what? Is the mountain a mountain? Yes, of course it’s a mountain, same as it ever was, but no, not really, because no one really returns from nothing forever.
