You could say he is "one who knows"
He mentioned the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. I'm working that bitch too, but I get flammed to often.
Rather than solving it, he wrestled with it until his mind basically cracked/collapsed, and suddenly what was beyond the mind became clear.
BTW, cases like his are extremely, extremely rare!
WoW.
I like this. But I guess he had to be actively thinking about this strange fucking thing, called "truth".
Ego (mind/identity) cannot comprehend the truth of it because they cannot co-exist (Truth and ego).
Also, how can you know this kind of cases are this rare?
To the extent I've read, this is more like a very random thing to happen to, pun intended a "particular" person
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He had a full blown awakening as a teenager which was abiding and never re-identified. Complete annihilation of self in one instant. If you examine the trajectory from hundreds of years of accounts of people on the path, zen schools and so on these are an extremely small percentage. "The end of your world" by Adyashanti is a great book that accounts what more of the typical journey is as well as the traps along the way. "I got it, I lost it" being very common, and even that is rare among seekers on the whole.
I also am referring though to his ability to articulate the stuff so clearly. Also, his ability to handle it an experience like that the way he did. He referred to keeping it like a small dimmer light because if he were to let it come out completely it would consume him. This shit sounds very abstract - but there are very real incidents of people having strong experiences of no-self, and getting killed by doing things like walking into traffic because they literally lose all sense of separation.
It's hard to make analogies to it because it's not like an achievement that is merit based, or some thing you earn -- it's the truth, but the more common path is one of gradually breaking down of illusions and so on. Most people have to study for a dozen years to be able to even conceive of what mozart was doing at 4-5 years old, no explaining that.
Buddha probably said it best, when someone asked him if he had attained: "I can't claim that I have attained, because I have attained"
The funny part is that it IS random
I believe it was Jourdain who gave an analogy like this:
You can't make the door open, but if you are there knocking on it, you have a better chance of going through it. So you continue knocking, knowing full well that there is absolutely no causal relationship between your knocking and the door opening.
He is a good example to use too because notice that he wasn't just passively pondering some thought. He was focused on the paradox of that idea with such intensity that he was almost passing out from it. It was total, immersive, intense focus - using the mind to go beyond itself, this is zen, not reading nice book about 'i should quiet my mind'