luckieluuke

William Blake is fantastic! and the others too. I really need some more non dualistic poetry in my life but sorry don´t have much to contribute. Zen buddhism has alot but never really appealed to me

The trap is when you believe that the other person brings happiness to you. When the truth is that you bring that happiness to yourself via that person. If you believe that person brings you happiness to you will soon "get used to it" and demand that he/she continue, which is impossible and the relationship will crumble. But if you realize only you create your own happiness you don´t depend on eachother in that ultimately destructive manner. You cannot control, cage or depend on real love.

@Shroomdoctor Exactly

My general feeling about JP is that he presents solid facts that our irrational culture finds provocative. Like him saying that there seems to be a problem with sexual harassment in the work space. Women paint their lips red because it represents sex. Is this not true? Men are equally responsible as women, and JP might do wisely to say that do thou Or saying that in an equal society the physical (rather than cultural) difference will be greater. Is that not true? Instead of learning from him and building on these truths to find a better way people demonize him and make up stuff like "it´s rhetorical trick" or "he leaves it to the audience to connect the dots". That is just your projecting yourself onto him. Just listen to the basic claims he makes, find out if it´s true and make up your own damn mind. In todays emotional driven politics and culture we need someone to point out uncomfortable truths that we need to talk about. And even if he does come from a regressive point of view it is a point that needs to be represented in a democrazy. Every aspect needs to be represented, that´s what makes democracy work. It´s in the chaos of confligt new ideas are born. So even if you don´t agree personally with his perspective you need to deal with what he is saying and realize that you might have something to learn. It´s like any other philosophy you learn about. There are some nuggets of gold in everything and it´s your job to find them and make your own ideas. But media don´t want to talk about them , so they demonize him. If you listen to media you will hate him, but if you listen to him you will see that he does have some valid point (if you are objective) I believe this is what divides people. Journalists and others twisting his word.

Theres an amazing game inspired by Alan Watts. It´s awesome! http://www.everything-game.com/

@herghly There is a very helpful and enjoyable forum over at ld4all.com for lucid dreaming It will probably take you longer than a few weeks so. Do reality checks as often as possible. Even better if you do "lucid living" where you constantly question your surroundings. It´s very similar to self enquiry. I combine the two.

I really do love you! Leo. Wow. You are such an explorer, adventure, psychonaut! You keep pushing the limits to find out what I am. I love that about you. Me and my ego applauds your voyage in life, how you relentlessly keep pushing to find out. Your curiosity amazes, as does your bravery! imagine the places you´ve been in mind! This is such a journey. And I honestly don´t know where it´s heading. But it is amazing! It´s like a game. I am one. But it´s so boring to play chess against myself so I split into two. What is this other thing that was me? I don´t know. But lets find out! Yay now I can play chess with someone. something. some thing... not me? Oh and I experience. Now I can share it! Thanks Leo for sharing! And thanks everyone on this forum! But you were me. And I Love you all deeply, whoever, wherever you are. Always know that. Always. I understand it can feel colorless and dull sometimes but remember we're just playing a game! Enjoy! Is the game pointless you say? No it has meaning. You create the meaning. The meaning is Love! The opposite of love is pointlessness so of course, there is meaning OK I admit, i´m not in my ordinary state.... and I don´t have anything to discuss. Just wanted to remind everyone out there who are going their path that I love you. Love is always the answer. If you´re ever confused, know that.

@Flammable Wow yea that´s crazy...or completely normal since either reality are equally real. It´s quite an awakening experience. Don´t feel weird for doing weird stuff in your dream. Once I took a motorsaw and cut of my own limbs just to see what it was like hehe. It was very very weird as one might imagine.

@Flammable There is a site and a wonderful, open, fun and loving community in the forums over at ld4all.com if you want to explore lucid dreaming more @Bluebird Haha yes me too! it takes some practice to manage to stay calm enough not to wake up lol

@Flammable Are you struck by awe at the realization that it´s just a dream? When I realized it, expecially the first times, it was among the most amazing experiences in my life. If it´s not that "special" of an event there is a chance that you merely are dreaming that you realize that it´s a dream. Similar to false awakenings. This is my very personal experience. Anyway you´re on the right track

Nice topic My DreamCharacters have a similar response when I ask them if they are aware that this is just a dream (or something along those lines) They answer something like "yes ofcourse" and continue talking about something else like it´s no big deal, like i´m being silly. It´s like they have that answer programmed into them and it hinders them from really asking the question or even take it seriously. But maybe they know that if they tell me "no it´s not a dream" im gonna insist that it is. I just wanna grab them and shake them and scream wake up goddammit! but it´s no use. That´s not the way to go about it. Recently read Jed Mckennas book "enlightenment the damnedest thing" and it seem similar to how he experience life. He knows it´s a dream and other ppl are dreamcharacters, stuck in the ratcace and not seeing the obvious thing, that it´s just a dream.

@Charlotte How I wish that movie was real (with Jim in it)

before enlightenment chop wood carry water, after enlightenment chop wood carry water

Yea Jim is awesome. The real deal

From my experience it´s great to calm the mind on the surface but not to go so deep. This seems to be because a mantra is an external object that you focus on. If you really want to quite the mind the mantra is not helpful because it is not you.

...and make sure you are comfortable and safe in your environment. And if you get the urge to explore the nature around you be careful not to get lost lol ;-)

@alankrillin Well yes, on the surface it does look like a scam. But when you hear honest people on this forum saying otherwise you might do wisely to loosen your judgement. @Nahm I´d also be very interested to hear you describe your experience with this in more detail

@Strikr @Elysian @Flammable @Hellspeed @alankrillin Have any of you actually tried it? Do you have experience the thing that you criticize? Sure, I agree the idea sounds crazy at first. But how do you know? How many here have had this done and what is the result? lets get the facts straight.

I think its just easier to explain to ego´s cause we believe in past and the future...we came up with the concepts. Actually there is no time as we know it, everything is happening now. But that is so hard to wrap your head around it´s easier to speak as if we were having lives that follow eachother in a linear manner.

I really enjoy games and in the last couple of years indie developers have been able to emerge via crowd funding. I also know that I probably play to much, it´s like 4 hours a week, which isn´t much compared to ppl watching TV. Playing a game is so much more engaging and creative than watching TV or even reading a book. For instance, try this game: http://www.everything-game.com/ ...Then again generally the big games most ppl are playing are low conscious. They made to dull our minds. So it is generally a good advice althou Leo doesn´t show much nuance in his judgement. Feels kinda black and white.

I didn´t write this text but I found it at the right time in my life and wanted to share it if someone else would need it. I feel there is quite a few questions about the dark night of the soul and such here so it might be interesting to someone. I don´t know if the author is enlightened or if this text is true. But it rings true in my ears at least. If Enlightenment Came with a Warning Label… So when you heard about spiritual awakening or enlightenment, what was the prize that you wanted in the end? What was the story that got you hooked? Perhaps it was something about experiencing endless bliss and joy, or maybe it was the end of suffering, or perhaps it was about experiencing constant Oneness with the Divine. Maybe it was the answer to all your life’s questions. It may be something else entirely, but whatever the case may be, I’m sure the bait was very shiny and attractive, yes? :lol It turns out that they don’t give you the full story when you start playing the game. What I’m about to share isn’t meant to discourage people on the path, but simply to help them be conscious if and when these things start occurring. These things don’t necessarily mean that something has gone wrong, although it may certainly seem that way. A helpful book to those who are experiencing the following symptoms is You’re Not Going Crazy… You’re Just Waking Up! Now, if spiritual awakening was to come with a series of warning labels, what would be printed on those labels? Warning: All your beloved attachments are going to be taken away from you. Everything you hold near and dear to your heart you must be completely and utterly willing to lose them. The more you hold onto them, the more you’ll suffer. It is only in the willingness to let go that find your freedom. By the way, letting go as a technique to trick the universe into granting your freedom, as in saying that you let go while peeking over your shoulder to see what’s to come, that doesn’t cut it. You can’t B.S. your way there. Believe me, I’ve tried… No one else has been able to pull that one off either. :lol Warning: You will experience dark nights of the soul. You will experience your entire world crumbling down. You will experience intense emotional roller coasters, to the point where you literally may feel like you’re going crazy. Warning: You must let go of all of your judgments and false sense of worth. You know all those accomplishments you’ve achieved in this lifetime? What do you brag about? You must let go of holding onto any of them as a way to enhance your self-worth and boost your sense of self. Your trophies and medals, while certainly valuable in their own right, they must lose their importance as something that makes you feel better or worthy. You are not valuable because of anything you have ever done or ever will do. You are valuable simply because you are. Because you exist. All the blows to your pride and are ways to help you let go of your false sense of worth and open up to the realization of your true worth. Warning: You must let go of all your ideas about God. In order to find God, you must quit telling yourself you already know God. All the ideas that you’ve grown up hearing, being taught, holding onto, or rejecting, all of them have to be let go of in order to be seen through. Warning: You will find yourself entering a place with no rules, no shoulds and shouldn’ts, no technique, no strategies, and no room for all of your egoic stuff and the energy of division. Warning: Your ego will throw fits. Your painbody will go crazy. Your buttons will get pushed. Your ego will throw out every trick in its book. When you start learning how to get past its tricks, it’ll become more sneaky and subtle. As you advance, your ego advances. It all happens to bring more awareness to the energies within, to help you let go of that which you previously have been unconscious to. Warning: The egoic dangers don’t end after awakening. In fact, as Adyashanti points out, the dangers after awakening get more dangerous and there’s much more of them. For example, one can settle in to seeing the Absolute as the only valid perspective and disregarding the world of the relative because it’s all “illusion.” This can lead to some very unconscious behavior and a letting go of changing that because “it doesn’t matter” and “there’s no one to change it.” Remember, the world is illusion, yes. Brahman alone is real, yes. BUT, the world IS Brahman. This is true non-duality: seeing the Reality in the so-called illusion as one. Warning: Just because you wake up, that doesn’t mean that everyone will love you and you’ll never have any struggles in life again. Just look at Jesus if you have any doubts about that one. Warning: You must come out of hiding. All the dark stuff within you that you haven’t been wanting to look at and be truthful about, it’ll all come up to the surface. All that stuff you hide from other people, the things you don’t want to show to others or to yourself, your inside will become your outside. There’s no hiding ANYTHING from anyone. It’s a deep deep level of vulnerability, sincerity, and self-honesty. Warning: All your life lessons will come to the surface. You’ll have to look at and accept everything. There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to go. You can only be here, now. There’s no one to become. Waking up isn’t a self-improvement course. Although it may appear this way on the surface, the point of waking up isn’t to become more spiritual, more loving, more enlightened, or more acceptable in the eyes of God. It’s about Self-realization, about realizing who and what you really are. You return back to your natural state and be who you really ARE, that which doesn’t have to be created, manifested, or maintained. Warning: The farther you go, the more painful it becomes to deviate from the Truth of your being. Think of it this way: If you walk into a tree at 2 mph, it’s no big deal. If you whack a tree while running as fast as you can, it’s gonna hurt. The deeper you go into Being, the more painful it is when you lie even just a little bit, hold back your Truth, don’t allow yourself to be who you are, resist what is, judge another, or in any way violate natural laws. You get a lot less slack. In Zen they call it walking the Razor’s Edge. Deviate even a little bit and you quickly get cut. Warning: You have to take complete and total responsibility for everything and everyone that shows up in your life. As your consciousness begins returning back to its natural state of timelessness, manifestation starts happening much more clearly and the link between inner thoughts and vibrations and outer manifestation becomes REALLY clear. No longer do you get the luxury of blaming others or judging others. Everything you see as a problem in others instantly gets turned around and becomes your problem. You’ll begin taking on a lot more pressure once everyone’s problems start to become yours. The world truly is your mirror. All the problems you really have with others really are problems you have within yourself. Get to work on surrender. It becomes a much more necessary skill later on. Warning: You must accept that you’ll never “get there,” that you’ll never “arrive.” You could spend an entire lifetime on this journey and never wake up. Indeed that has happened to many people. In fact, so long as you cling to your desire to get somewhere, you’ll never actually wake up to what’s already here. You must surrender completely your desire to succeed in your path of awakening. You must accept the fact that you may embark on the journey, never to actually get enlightened. Warning: You may feel very connected and One with Source/All That Is at times, and you will also experience yourself feeling totally disconnected, lost, confused, and cut off. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s the experience of pure separation, they very illusion we are trying to see beyond. Warning: Even if you get a glimpse of the Truth of your Being once or twice or a hundred times, the egoic structure may rebuild itself, leading to the experience of being unenlightened, or what we call a non-abiding awakening. Adyashanti reports that it usually takes people anywhere from 3-15 years for the momentum of awakening to settle in. Although it doesn’t happen in the future and can only happen in the now, don’t expect an overnight insta-fix. Warning: Just because you have a clear seeing of who you really are, that’s not the end of the journey. The first question is “Who Am I?” Once that’s discovered, it now becomes a matter of how what I AM manifests itself in this world. The second question upon realization is, “How then shall I live?” It’s not enough to have the inner realization. That realization must express itself out through the totality of your being for it to become a living realization. Warning: You must completely and utterly let go of control, of even controlling your survival, much less your destiny. You must be willing to die, to face the fear of death and surrender into it without attempting to stop it or control it in any way. The fear of death and the unknown become your friends. No longer will you be running from them. Warning: The more you begin living in the moment and letting go of the domination of your consciousness by your mind, you may begin experiencing memory loss. Whole blocks of memory will begin falling away. It’s not exactly like Alzehimer’s, but there very well may be some significant loss of short-term and/or long-term memory as you begin relying less upon memory and more upon a deeper intuitive knowingness. Warning: You may have intense kundalini awakenings to where it will feel like your entire nervous system is being overloaded. Many people have literally gone insane from this. It can be helpful to seek out some helpful resources including other people who have experienced similar symptoms, various practices you can do to work with the energies, and even a guru to help guide you safely through the process. Warning: You may experience cycles of confusion and clarity. In one moment you may be very wise, deep, loving, and compassionate, and in the next moment the cloudiness of the veil will return and you will no longer have a clue as to what’s going on. You may become sucked right back into your ego, experiencing your deepest and darkest fears. Warning: There is tremendous value in working with others, but you must learn to stand in your aloneness. Many of your relationships may change. Friends and family that have been close to you your whole life may be let go of. Some people will come, others will go. Some stay for the long haul. Which ones will stay and which ones will go? Who knows? The flow of the river will determine that more than any conscious decision. You can try to make it a conscious decision, but that will actually be more of a resistance to the flow and a desire to control than anything else. You don’t get to control the process. It happens. The you you think you are doesn’t make it happen. Warning: You don’t get anything as a result of awakening. There’s no thing you get as a prize such as a good feeling such as a constant never-ending wonderful enlightened experience or a boost to your self-esteem. (What self would we be talking about anyways who has a self-esteem?) You get nothing, but BOY what a nothing it is. By seeing that you ARE that nothingness, and that you ARE the entire universe arising from that nothingness, you realize that what you ARE is already more than anything that could ever be wanted, as Gangaji so beautifully puts it. Whew!! Now as I say all of this I’m laughing. In certain moments it can be a crazy, wild, intense, OMG-I’m-gonna-die experience, yes, particularly when you’re in the heat of the moment, but it’s like waking up from a dream at night… You recognize that it was all just a dream and it doesn’t feel like it was actually all that real. What you ARE is infinitely more real than anything that appears in this world. Those experiences will begin to feel so distant and faded, like a memory that you can only partially and vaguely remember, as if it happened to another person entirely in another far-off world. That said, it’s worth it. It’s all SO worth it. The direct realization of who and what you really are is SO worth all of the bumps and jolts that we experience along the way. Things to lighten up as you do. Not everyone will necessarily experience every single thing listed above. For some people, some experiences may be more profound than others. In fact, there are many other things that one may experience that haven’t been listed in this post. Either way, there is a book I’d HIGHLY recommend that people check out titled You’re Not Going Crazy… You’re Just Waking Up! by Michael Mirdad. You can read my full review of it here. For those of you who’ve also been walking the path for a little while now, what “warnings” would you give someone who’s getting started and doesn’t know what to expect? By: Ariel Bravy

no it most certainly wont ...then again it might produce the ability to have sex with the entire universe.....

@Shin That´s a crazy idea! Serve me knowledge noooowww!!!! ;-)

My line of thought: 1.We´ve learnt so much about how the body works the last century but still the recomended diet hasnt changed much: eat a bit of everything. 2. Our bodies have evolved with the food we eat. For instance its made to take care of an apple as it is, but not if you extract and purify one component of it. Such as sugar or even vitamins (in pills) 3. We think we understand nature, we make a map of the reality but it´s just a map and we´re not clever enough to understand reality. For instance we think we have a problem with a plant so we import a animal to eat it, changing the whole eco system and creating more problem then we had. This is the common problem of the intellect and thought. We try to control reality and when we act we create more problems which we try to solve and end up creating more problems creating a never ending spiral (Maybe in a similar way we created our ego cause we couldn´t face the void) Following this line of thought I fear that we think we understand how the brain and body works and according to this understanding we bring in a new parameter in the system that has never been there before in that shape and form (a purified selection of compounds, ie nootropics) in order to make it better. But we have no idea of the reality of the situation, only our concepts of how it should work. Then again this is how we learn, we dare to try new stuff.... I can´t help to think that the difficulties we have as individuals are in fact what we need to learn and become better. If you are depressed and take a pill it makes it better but you don´t solve the problem. If you have no energy and solve it with drugs then you don´t solve the problem. If you lack motivation maybe a pill isn´t the answer, maybe you have to change you´r lifestyle, friends, philosophy, work etc and grow as a person. But there is a part smaller or bigger in all of us that don´t want to change. Still, I might be trying nootropics myself

@Solace