riplo

It's presumptuous to rule something out completely because some sages advice against it. Sex has been demonised for a long time and seen as temptation but there are definitely people who have used sex for their spiritual development.

Anyone every had an enlightenment type experience from just sex (or some kind of sexual yoga) alone? I'd be interested to hear your stories, or if this is even possible or a valid path.

@Spacious What you said about primal therapy is really interesting - do you mind telling me what video Peterson talks about the malevolence in and what retreat you went on?

Spirituality talks about enlightenment or reality or truth having positive or kind of higher consciousness qualities - like love, honesty, peace, joy, health, energy, patience, wisdom, true creativity, compassion, generosity, humility, humbleness etc... but why? For some of these, like honesty, it seems obvious why living in truth would produce that. But for something like joy... why is enlightenment inherently joyful? Is it that identification with self produces all the negative 'opposite' qualities (like selfishness vs generosity), and getting rid of that identification means getting rid of those negatives? This doesn't really explain why reality is inherently loving or joyful though. Where does divine love come from?

That may be true, but it's not really answering the question

In the last few months, I've noticed that my dreams are pretty much always intense, scary or extremely stressful - I'm always trying to solve a very intense problem and am extremely relieved when I wake to find that it was all just a dream. One common one is that I kill someone by accident and then am desperately trying to hide the body for some reason till I wake up. I get 7-9 hours sleep daily and wake up at 9am every day, eat reasonable healthy, aren't very stressed in day to day life and I meditate, but I find that I wake up not feeling rested - pretty sure this is due to the stessful dreams. I've looked online but the solutions given all seem quite superficial. Does anyone else have this problem, or have a deep solution?

A lot of personal development books talk about changing your self image as being the key to actually changing your behaviour and level of effectiveness in life. For example if you have problems with lets say work ethic, one way to tackle that is to make change your perception of yourself from someone who can't / isn't meant to achieve much, to someone who is willing to put in the work to live a great life, thus installing a different self image. But then from spirituality we know it's your self image that ends up causing you a lot of suffering. For example being a workaholic is in part because you have that rigid identity as someone who provides for their family etc. So should we try and install different beliefs about ourselves, or is that a trap?

How do you know when direct experience is actually pointing you to the 'truth', as opposed to pointing you to something that’s 'false'. For example, seeing a humanoid devil creature strangling your mother could potentially be directly experienced, and so could experiencing your true nature as universal awareness. In spirituality we say one of these is true direct experience, and true reality, while one is a delusion. But since direct experience is the only way to understand reality, because we know that human rationality and thought is deeply flawed, then we have to rely on direct experience only, even to determine which of the two direct experiences is valid. So how do we stop ourselves going along with delusions while trusting direct experience above rationality? What do you guys think

So I've been meditating for a good while now, and my preferred way of sitting when I do so is on one of the benches (or a similar structure I arrange out of whatever objects are around) shown below, sitting with my legs tucked under. I'm very inflexible and this way of sitting is perfect, as over time I've already flexible-d those specific muscles or whatever required to sit like this. It's pretty hard to fall asleep like that, as opposed to sitting normally on a chair, and it naturally keeps your back straight. I have tried to begin a Kriya yoga practise, sitting in the same way as Leo describes in his 'How to sit for Kriya' video on the blog. I've been doing the practise for only about a week now, and I'm able to sit like he shows reasonably comfortably, but after literally like 5 minutes my legs go completely numb from cut off circulation, and seeing as I try to sit for 25 minutes, it doesn't seem like a very healthy way to sit for the practise in this case. I know that over time my flexibility will increase, but will circulation in my legs (ie will they stop going numb)? Is it a better idea to just use the bench, or is there an actual reason for why I shouldn't do so for yoga specifically? Thanks guys x