Leo Gura

No, actually you don't control them AT ALL. Notice that you actually have ZERO control over your thoughts. Notice that you have no idea what thought will come in the next 3 seconds. Let alone any further out than that. BIG HAIRY PURPLE ELEPHANT. See, I just implanted a thought into your mind. You had zero control over it. In fact, I have more control over your thoughts than you do! FAST JUICY WEASEL. See! I did it again. I am in control of your thoughts! The thought that "I control my thoughts" is itself a thought that you did not control, did not will into being, but that just arose spontaneously. Apply more awareness to your actually process of thinking until you break this illusion that you have any control over them. Here's something to try: Stop all thoughts for the next 30 seconds. Notice you cannot do it. That should make you very suspicious of this idea that you control thoughts. If you had the control claim you have, you should easily be able to stop your thoughts for a measly 30 seconds. The entire notion of control is one big fat lie. You've never controlled anything in your life. You've only thought you have.

Your idea of nothing is backwards. Nothing isn't nothing, it's something. If you want to know what nothing looks like: it looks PRECISELY like what you call the "physical world", but also every other kind of world imaginable. Something and nothing are one. --------- You are not going to understand this with the mind. It is impossible. You're asking questions about the Absolute here. The Absolute is beyond your questions or anything you can imagine. Even after you experience the Absolute, it is still impossible to imagine it. That's how Absolute it is. It's sort of like seeing Bigfoot, but he looks so weird that you cannot see him again in your mind's eye even after you've clearly seen him. Unless, of course, you're looking at him right now. Imagine if you will that reality is an infinite mirage. It only appears to exist, but actually doesn't. Because there is no arbiter of what is real or unreal, everything is nothing. There is no such thing as an absolute reference frame for reality. It's sort of like being in outer space, where up and down have no meaning without the Earth's gravity as a reference frame. Your existence is the reference frame defining your reality. Without that reference frame, there is nothing. And your reference frame is itself a fiction.

Nothing

@hinawashi The corruption isn't a bug, it's the main feature. See... when nothing actually exists, the only way for it to come into being is through lies. There is no reality. So ego has to make one up. The reason you're not understanding this is because you assume a reality exists which can ground things. But in fact there cannot possibly be such a thing as reality. That's just the ego.

Well, nonduality is a tricky thing. It's sorta like the elephant in the room which nobody sees. And IF you see it, it might change your plans in life. But also, don't put the cart too far before the horse. You don't really know what nonduality entails, so as always you have to keep living your life using imperfect information. Your desire to help people psychologically is probably genuine. What nonduality would do is purify that desire and show you more effective ways of serving people than perhaps traditional psychotherapy. Don't get too far ahead of where you are. Ideas of enlightenment are not enlightenment, and will not feed or comfort you. It's still the best strategy to stick to what you're more passionate about.

This has been solved. Just use the Technical Support contact form in the future. If your router is dynamically changing IP addresses, that might be the issue. Using multiple devices from one or two locations is never blocked.

Jesus was a mushroom

@OnceMore Imagine being dead, but still being able to see out your eyes. That's it in a nutshell.

@sleeperstakes Because you ARE Truth.

Just do it. There is no how. You need to learn how to just start taking action. And the only way to do that is by doing it.

You'd be surprised how well that can work. The trick is that you have to actually REALLY do the visioning and the wishing every day. It's not easy work. My changes of attitude about LoA concern its metaphysical foundations, which has almost no bearing on the practical application of LoA in everyday life.

@lucas_darby Try just sitting with the confusion and being very mindful of it, dropping the need to have the answer. It's easy to reject confusion. The counter-intuitive move is to bask in it.

@egoless There's good and bad news. The only enemy is yourself

I played it for many hundreds of hours as a kid. Helped to hone my long-range strategic thinking skills.

M.A.X. Deepest strategy game of all time: https://www.gog.com/game/m_a_x_m_a_x_2 P.S. M.A.X. 2 sucks

@egoless Congratulations! You have unwittingly re-invented Vajrayana Buddhism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana Yidam visualization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yidam Diety yoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana#Deity_yoga

@BobbyLowell Well, except for the hunchbacks.

@AdamDiC There's nothing wrong with selective focus for periods of time. Maybe for the next month you should just stick with meditation. Then once that habit gets locked in, you can come back and study other things.

@Ether It's like you're asking, "How come I'm not like Tiger Woods after a few hours of hitting golf balls?" If it was that easy, there would be no Actualized.org, no self-help, no psychology, no yoga, no religions, no spiritual traditions, no Buddha, no Jesus, no Ekhart Tolle. People would just sit down, shut off their mind, and all their problems would melt away as they died into Nirvana. The Buddha spent 7 years of full-time training to get there. That should give you some idea of what it takes to shut up the mind.

I'm not really interested in criticizing individual people or scientists. I'm more interested in science as a whole, as a culture, as an epistemic framework. My critiques are aimed at the epistemic framework which is governing all those people you talk about: Dennett, Krauss, Harris, etc. That said, all of them are dogmatic and wrong in various ways. I find it rather pointless to get into who is more wrong, or who is more dogmatic. That's rather irrelevant. What matters is that they have very obvious bindspots in their worldviews which could easily be corrected if they were more openminded and more willing to investigate the limitations of the scientific/rationalist epistemic framework. Dawkins & Dennett seem the most closedminded of the bunch. Dakwins especially is a crusader for materialism, without being conscious of just how mistaken his entire worldview is. I understand why he does it, but that does not save him. Harris has his own unique flavors of dogma. He's very wrapped up in rationalism, to a fault. His understanding of psychedelics is very limited. If he believes that consciousness takes place in a brain, well, he's very wrong about that. I'm not exactly sure what he believes, but a grasp of the Absolute nature of reality, and the inner workings of epistemology, he does not have. He's also very moralistic, which shows me that he is not conscious that all of morality and ethics is a human invention. Once you reach certain high levels of consciousness, it becomes extremely clear who gets it, and who doesn't. There are subtle but clear cues you can read off people. People who have never experienced such levels of consciousness cannot even imagine what they don't know and the cue they're giving of. A highly conscious person can read two paragraphs of any book written by a man and accurately gauge that author's level of delusion, consciousness, and grasp of reality. You can literally go down a bookshelf throwing 95% of the books into the trashcan after reading a page or two. This includes most science books and most of the works written by the people above. Sam Harris' book might be one exception which has some redeeming value because he's actually done some consciousness work. Although it only scratches the surface of consciousness. Saying "I don't know" is not enough. Beyond that there is actual consciousness of extraordinary existential truths. As far as I can see, none of these people has ever experienced Absolute Infinity. Which basically means that everything they think they know about reality is just a story. It works well for their audience who isn't very conscious. But it does not pass muster AT ALL with me, or anyone who's done serious consciousness work. A real yogi would just laugh at their ideas. The extent of their misunderstanding of reality is so massive, it would take a hundred hours to explicate it all. The mind is ingenious at self-justifying its worldviews and spinning air-tight-looking paradigms. It would take me a few years to write a book explaining all the ways in which such people are mistaken. And even so, such a book would just end up getting demonized by them. Don't expect such people to admit that they are wrong, no matter how much evidence you present or how well you reason with them. It's not a matter of reason. It's matter of self-preservation. Their entire lives and careers are at stake here. Their children's ability to eat is at stake. They would rather die than let that go. It's not their fault. They are not bad people. They are just not very conscious. As 99.999% of all humans aren't. Again, don't believe me. You must investigate the truth of things for yourself. I am just sharing my observations. If these people were really openminded, and we had like 10 hours, I could sit down with each of them and show them exactly where their metaphysics and epistemology is mistaken, and all the real-world consequences this has in their personal lives, professional lives, and their ability to understand mankind, history, science, evolution, medicine, religion, philosophy, mathematics, etc.

@AdamDiC Dismiss what nonsense? Meditation is just one component of development. You definitely will be missing out on a lot of stuff if all you do is meditation. That is not enough, and it will produce a lopsided, half-baked development. There's nothing confusing here. Meditate your ass off if you like, but also be learning and growing in other fields as well. This is just common sense. Meditation will not make you good in relationships, social skills, life purpose, career, communication skills, understanding of society, etc. Yes, meditation can be very powerful, but it shouldn't be your only tool. Self-help and nonduality are not really in conflict. They can dove-tail beautifully. Self-help doesn't have to mean that you drift from your mindfulness practice.

@Adam M Never re-dose during a trip. You're breaking protocol and that will come back to bite you in the ass one day. Being desperate to trip is asking for trouble. Decide on your dose ahead of time, then take it, and whatever happens happens. Do not re-dose. The point is to do a controlled experiment and see the full effects of whatever dose you decided on.

@realname Discover for yourself what is true. I'm just a guy sharing ideas.

@Samurai Y Well, you have to be wise enough to care more about truth than you do about people. Then, one day, you may discover that that will come full-circle Don't frame ordinary life as separate from truth. Rather, align your ordinary life with truth so that one reinforces the other. Talking about enlightenment all the time is not necessary. That's what I do because that's my job. For you, just do the self-inquiry and go about enjoying your ordinary life as best you can.

It's a rather loose term. But as you hit higher states of consciousness, you'll start to notice energy flowing through your body in weird ways. That's usually called Kundalini energy or Qi. Body energy work is an entire sub-domain of self-improvement. There's Reiki masters you can go to, energy healers, etc. They can actually manipulating the energy around in your body. It sounds New-Agey, but it's pretty cool when to actually experience them working on you. Stuff shifts for you. Energetic blockages are common causes of ailments like chronic fatigue, back pain, anger, etc. The body and mind are a highly interconnected system. Stop thinking of them as separate things. Most of your emotions transpire in your body, not your head.