1) The story it tells
2) How it shows up in your consciousness, its being
If you had a thought in a foreign language which you did not understand the sounds would register in your consciousness (that's the actuality or being of a thought) but it would have no meaning/content/story.
速い茶色のキツネが怠zyな犬を飛び越えた
That sentence has being for you but no meaning (unless you know Japanese).
Notice that being is what's primary while meaning is secondary. You can have being without meaning but you cannot have meaning without being.

No reading on retreat!
The point of a retreat is to break your attachment to symbolic reality.

Jerking off into napkin is killing a billion lives.
Having a period is killing a life.
Surviving an infection is killing millions of microscopic lives.
See the arbitrariness and self-bias of how your ego-mind draws its boundaries.
Pro-lifers are stuck because they refuse to admit the relativity of morality. And nothing you say will change their mind because they are not interested in seeking truth, they are interested in defending their beliefs.
What people don't want to admit is that all evil is imaginary and invented by the ego for the purpose of its survival. Evil is falsehood.

No, men are not being oppressed. The ego just perceives equalizing as oppression because a self-biased mind doesn't see a difference.
If you owned slaves 200 years ago your ego-mind would perceive abolition as unfair and oppressive. Because it is from the POV of a slave owner. The slave owner feels fully entitled to own slaves. To take way his slaves would appear to him as robbery or debasement of the natural order.
Equality is a radical thing. It means the ego has to surrender what it has taken for granted as its own.
It is a projection of a low consciousness mind that if it gives up domination it will be dominated by those who complained about being dominated by it. The key is to realize that those you dominated may not be interested in dominating you back, they just want a non-dominating dynamic on all sides.

If you ever die in your dreams you should notice that you still exist as nothingness afterwards.
That should be your clue that you cannot actually die.

Women had less rights because for the majority of mankind's evolution the state of consciousness was so low that physical force determined rights and power hierarchies. Survival was unbelievably brutal and physical. The strongest dominated the weakest and established "rights" and rules which served them.
But now we are starting to move away from brutal animalistic survival and now the physical strength difference between men and women is becoming less and less important.
It is not a matter of men deciding to give women rights, but rather the entire species is evolving in consciousness and society is developing hard and soft infrastructure which allows for non-violent means of existence. This is not a process anyone controls. Men do not control it. Both men and women are puppets of larger evolutionary forces which drive the entire universe towards greater consciousness and love. Those who are physically weaker are treated with more compassion. This is true not just of women but children, the sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, animals, the environment, etc.
Once you are conscious enough it is no longer tenable to dominate others even if you happen to be physically bigger or stronger than them. It hurts your own consciousness to do so. Ego is slowly realizing the existential equality of all beings by looking past the material differences -- which are not fundamentally important.
Rather than seeing all this as a fight for rights, see it as an expansion of consciousness, love, and self-identity.
If you were highly conscious and had high Self-Love, you would not have a desire to dominate anyone, even if it gave you some temporary material gain. The material gain is inferior to Selflessness.

Love is EVERYTHING.
It doesn't matter what feeling you have or choice you make. That is the point. The ego sets conditions on love to suit its survival because it's biased. But love is not limited to that. Love is unlimited, infinite, and unconditional. Whether you understand that is another matter.

@lukmi
1) How many times did this happen exactly? Two times? That doesn't necessarily mean anything. Could just be a fluke. Although it is a bit odd.
2) Learn to provide amazing sex and girls will be begging you to go exclusive with them. Seems like your sex is missing the dominance and newness components. For sex to be good, you have to find ways to keep it new. Don't be doing the exact same routine every time. Fuck her in the restaurant bathroom once in a while. Etc. Get creative. Dominance is also important. Drive up the masculine/feminine polarity. Make her feel feminine so she is satisfied.
You can also up your value as a man. As you become more successful, more confident, more humorous, more wise, more healthy, etc. all this will massively attract her to you. She should see you as a one-of-a-kind catch. She should feel like she won the lottery in dating you.

India simply lacks basic high-quality governmental infrastructure to sustain peace between all those tribes: court systems, roads, uncorrupted police, bridges, toilets, parks, meat inspections, etc. All of that must be built up before Stage Green can emerge in a significant way.
There cannot be Stage Green if 200 million people are still wiping their ass with their bare hands like they did 5,000 years ago.
The function of government is to solve such logistical challenges. By solving such challenges egos are pacified and there can be talk of higher consciousness values. Otherwise people behave like animals.

By becoming a passionate musician today you ARE setting an example for generations to come.
The example must be set way early. These are seeds that must be planted hundreds of years in advance. Just like how the seed for democratic government had to be planted some 2500 years ago by the Greeks. Those seeds are still just sprouting.
Don't wait to plant the seed.
That is the point of automation. That is why automation is a very good and important trend. Automation frees up mankind to pursue their passions without needing to do grunt work. Most people simply don't understand this yet because living a passionate life is scary -- it takes a lot more responsibility and consciousness.

Of course your Spiral Stage totaly depends on where and when you were born.
If you were born into Hitler's shoes, you'd be precisely Hitler. This is so obvious it should go without saying, yet people are in such denial about it that they manage to overlook this obvious fact.
Nothing whatsoever seperates you from the most evil people who ever lived. The ego is that imagined seperation.

No, it's not conscious. It's a lack of consciousness. It's self-bias, closemindedness, ego, and just how Stage Blue cognition works.
He is genuine in his beliefs. Basically all people are genuine in their ignorance.
From Ben Shaprio's POV, he's helping the world be a better place, he's acting from love -- like all people. But since his self-awareness is quite low, his love ends up being very selfish and partial. It's not really his fault. All evil is simply lack of consciousness. Which is why evil doesn't really exist. It is just misdirected love.
Here you must distinguish between the intelligence required to think within the box of society vs the intelligence of truly original thinking.
To earn a law degree you don't need to do any original thinking, you just need to be very good at following the rules and orders that society has laid out for you. You need to be a good soldier. Which is what Stage Blue excels at. Stage Blue is great at being meticulously conformist. If you need to hire someone to make sure that concentration camps operate like well-oiled machines, you hire a nice conformist boy like Ben Shaprio to manage it for you. He will do it without asking any questions. This was in fact how Nazi Germany was run.
Nothing strange about it. Every political position can be criticized from above or below, not just left vs right. You can be anti-interventionist from above or below. For example, you could believe that it's wrong to start a war in the Middle East because they are low-life savages who don't even deserve to fight the noble white man. But such anti-interventionism is further from Stage Green anti-interventionism than wanting to invade the Middle East to steal their oil. One would first have to evolve in consciousness just to see the Middle East as a worthwhile place to steal oil from, and only then one might evolve further in consciousness to actually care about the lives and interests of Middle Easterners as much as white lives and interests.
You can be opposed to war for the wrong reasons. What matters most is not the fact that you oppose war, but what level of consciousness you're seeing the situation from. You might oppose war because you're to fearful of getting drafted. But that is a selfish perspective which is very different from opposing war because you're conscious of the suffering it would cause the "enemy".
The true problem with the Middle East wars is not that it hurts America's interests, but that it creates suffering for innocent and powerless people in the Middle East. It's like kicking a wounded dog and blaming the dog.

If every human took a shit in the same room, we'd all be dead.
Nothing material scales infinitely. Everything has to be in proportion in a complex society.
The mistake in your logic is that you assume that following your passion means that this should scale across 7 billion people. But of course it won't, simply because 95% won't ever even hear the advice, let alone follow it, so it's not something to worry about.
Following your passion is advice aimed at 5% of the population. And that is workable. And by the time 5% of the population is following their passion, that will open the doors for another 5% to do the same, and so on, until one day we can have 50%+ people doing it, and maybe some day 90%+. But this will take many generations.
You can be a musician precisely because most people have no interest in being musicians because they are not wired like you. Probably less than 1% of people in the world would choose to be a musician if they have total freedom to do whatever they wanted.
For example, human civilization would collapse if everyone became enlightened overnight. Which is precisely why it will never happen. Enlightenment is very rare precisely because it needs to be rare in order for civilization to sustain itself. But this is irrelevant if you are the one who knows awakening is your thing.

This applies all the way up and down the chain of life.
If a Unified World Government seems unlikely or impractical, just remember that 2000 years ago the idea of a country was crazy because there were only walled city-states. And 2 billion years ago, the idea of multicellular organisms was crazy because there were only single-celled organisms eating each other.
For a human body to exist, single-celled organisms had to learn to cooperate with each other despite having their own selfish agendas.
This is a game that life has played out for 2 billion years.

Every US general and secretary of defense is a war criminal by the US's own logic.
Of course top military leaders mastermine the deaths of thousands of people. That is their job.
By the US's own logic, all top US officials are justified to be assassinated for their military planning. That's how absurdly self-biased the position is.

JP carefully avoids serious discussions of policy. He's focused on culture wars to distract from real issues like corporate corruption, environmental destruction, military-industrial complex, gross income inequality, gerrymandering, voter suppression, suppression of unions, anti-trust violations, etc.
Because in his world these are not important issues. His world revolves around silly happenings on college campuses. You can't make a good career out of talking about serous policy issues. It's much easier to make a career out of being a cultural warrior who wages a lesser Jihad.
The fundamental conservative position is that things are basically fine if we just return to the way things were and stop rocking the boat with progressive ideas. The need for structural reform isn't evident to them because they are busy defending the system to which they have hitched their identity.
A Christian doesn't see a need to reform Christianity, he sees the evils of Islam instead.
A scientists doesn't see a need to reform science, he sees the evils of religion instead.
A democrat doesn't see a need to reform the democrat party, he sees the evils of republicans instead.
This is classic self-deception: create a distraction by projecting the problem outward at some scapegoat. Meanwhile, no deep self-reflection is done and no real internal structure change is made -- which his exactly what the ego wants.
JP doesn't want to seriously investigate the structural limitations of capitalism. So he scapegoats liberals as Neo-Marxists which creates a loud flashy sideshow that draws in a crowd of mouth-breathers who also have no interest in a deep analysis of capitalism. As that would actually require some mental and emotional labor. It would be scary and unsettling to admit that maybe you are part of a corrupt and mindless capitalist regime that perpetuates the needless suffering of millions. Especially if that regime earns you good money and feeds your children.

Your issue is more basic than meditation. Meditation is not going to fix your neediness because you're not at a level of development yet where you can even take meditation seriously.
The advice for you is: work on your isolation, learn to socialize, build social skills, develop friends, develop dating skills, have sex, and THEN meditation will help you reach higher levels.
Meditation is not a shortcut for avoiding learning basic survival skills like dating, making money, proper diet, etc. Meditation is a rather advanced skill for people who have already become proficient at survival and want to reach the next level.
Once you've had a bunch of sex and made a bunch of money, then you ask, "Okay, what's next?" That's where meditation starts to look appealing.
Don't assume that. Most people here don't meditate or meditate so ineffectively that they might as well be watching TV.
Serious meditation is a rare skill that very few people practice.
And meditation takes years to pay off.

Well, that's not gonna happen. Even the idea of a safe space is already ridiculed and demonized by the right-wing. And they are certainly incapable of non-judgment and non-criticism. As are most left-wingers.
If we could get everyone to agree to a safe space and non-judgment, we would already have solved 90% of the worlds problems.
Yup, I get that too. Listening to aggressive ignorance really tests one's patience and compassion. That's the challenge of our work. How do you deal with people who are so closedminded and ignorant that they might be willing to kill you for speaking truth?
Even Jesus couldn't solve that problem.

Suffering sits deeper than belief.
When the suffering gets strong enough, all your pretty beliefs will fly out the window. Then only consciousness can prevail. And even that will flag and wane for most people. Only training of consciousness can overcome that.

The point is precisely that if you were conscious that suffering is imaginary, it would stop being painful.
But you're not conscious of that, so it is still painful for you.
There is a big difference between believing that suffering is imaginary vs actually being conscious of it at the moment of the torture. This work is not done at the level of belief.
So you're right in that there is no point in believing that reality is imaginary.
But you're wrong in that that's not what I'm suggesting you to do. I'm suggesting you to become CONSCIOUS of it. Which is a totally different thing. You are not anywhere near being conscious of it yet. This seems like a word game because for you it IS only a word game. But I am telling you there is something beyond the word game which you are not yet aware of. If you ever go beyond the word game, that's where you'll feel the difference.
Imagine becoming so conscious that you can no longer be physically killed. That's what we're talking about here. Obviously this cannot happen as a matter of belief. You must actually become physically unkillable. How is such a thing possible? Well, if you knew how, you'd already be immortal. So of course it won't make much sense from your current vantage point. You have to be willing to go radically outside the box of what you consider reality to be.
You have to appreciate that your ego will try to keep all of these teachings safely at the level of word games. Because then the ego is never threatened. The challenge in this work is to make sure you're actually doing the work, not just thinking about it. Thinking about doing the work is not the same as doing the work. Talking about enlightenment is not enlightenment. Thinking about reality being an illusion is not the same as experiencing it as such in every moment.
It is the difference between talking about having a million dollars vs actually having one million in cash in your closet.

The topics we deal with here are inherently dangerous and could not be otherwise since they involve undoing and transcending survival.
Spirituality is very dangerous to the ego-mind. These dangers are not merely perceptual, they are also "actual", in the sense of physical danger. You can't do serious spiritual work and also complain, "But this can be dangerous". Of course! If it wasn't dangerous it wouldn't be worth doing. The whole point is that its dangerous and therefore rarely done well.
This works requires enormous nuance, care, and intelligence. These are structural meta-qualities which cannot ever be codified in the form of content. Which means, no matter how many times a teacher says to be nuanced, careful, and intelligent, it will not help someone who is sloppy, careless, and ignorant. You cannot make a person intelligent by telling them to be intelligent. If things were so easy we wouldn't be here struggling with consciousness.
The danger of the work is exactly what makes it so appealing. There are stakes. Much like life. Otherwise it would just be armchair philosophy with no transformative power. Changing your life comes at a cost. You might change it for the worse.

No, because they are not phenomena.
Consciousness itself transcends all contents of consciousness in the way that a TV screen is permanent even though the content it displays is impermanent.
The mistake you're making here is thinking of enlightenment/consciousness as phenomena. They are not. That's the whole point. If they were phenomena they would not be worth pursuing.
1) The mind is always changing.
2) The mind will be gone forever with death. It only seems permanent because you're judging it exclusively from inside itself, inside the context of your life. Your mind is treating your life as an absolute standard next to which everything else is judged and understood. But this is precisely backwards. You life could end in a split second at any moment and nothing of it will remain.

Well, that Void is a classic advanced meditation state. Totally healthy and fine.
Of course it will be shocking for anyone the first time they encounter it. The ego-mind will perceive it as death.

It's not that big of deal for me. Just don't do it more than once a day, and take some days off in between. A couple times a week seems to work best.
Don't forget, having sex actually takes a lot more time and energy.
As with most things, a lot depends on how you do it and how you frame it in your mind. For me there is no negative vibe associated with it. You can do it in healthy ways to rejuvenate yourself.

@Dean Walker Figuring all that out is the bulk of your path. We can't tell you want you want and in which order you want it. You have to introspect to get clear about what your priorities should be for the next 5 years, let's say. Usually you want to focus on one key area of life like: business/career/life purpose, relationships/family, health/fitness, spirituality/meditation, education, etc.
You can't do it all at once. You gotta prioritize what you're most engaged in working on, what you most need to advance to the next stage.
As an example, my first business stage lasted about 3 years, basically full-time. Then my relationship/dating stage lasted 1-2 years almost full-time. Then my next life purpose/business stage lasted 6 years, almost full-time. My fitness stage lasted a few years, part-time, sprinkled within the stages above.
Remember, life is long and if you're young you've got plenty of time to pace yourself and plan stuff out in stages. 3 years invested into X, 5 years invested into Y, 2 years invested in Z.
If you are starting a new biz, I would recommend planning to invest 5 years into it. At least 3 years. Anything less than that I just don't see how you'll succeed. 3 years is barely enough time for something like that.
Not all things require equal time. Something like biz will be one of the most time-intensive things in your life if you want to succeed at it. Competition is fierce and there is a never-ending amount of work. Since biz is such a massive time investment it's wise to be very clear what values your want your business to represent.