@cle103 The key insight you're missing is that something and nothing are identical. Form is formlessness. All distinction is imaginary.
Nothing has ever happened. And everything that has happened is nothing. The two are one.
Keep tripping and contemplating this. You'll get it. You are close.

This is not merely a question of insurance coverage, this is an issue of wealth redistribution.
The fundamental problem is that the entire healthcare industry's profit margins are way too high. They are artificially high because people's lives are being held hostage in the negotiation and people are negotiating with both hands tied behind their backs due to how the healthcare industry created a cartel.
It would be like if me and a few of my rich friends bought up every source of fresh drinkable water in your state and then charged you 10x to have a drink. And when you complained about how unfair this system is, we'd invest $100 million dollars in a propaganda campaign to call you Communists.
The government is the only organization which has the leverage to renegotiate the terms of the deal.
The bottom line is, doctors & executives will have to settle for earning less money so that more people can live. That's what this whole discussion is really about and no one wants to admit it. A bold politician must rise up who will say, point-blank: "You guys will earn less money, for the greater good. Sorry, not sorry." Bernie Sanders is one such politician.

Hey guys, I just finished my notes for this paper that was posted by Leo a while back on his blog. It's a research paper on developmental psychology, akin to spiral dynamics. I really got into it and I learned a lot, so I wanted to share my notes with you.
A note of warning: the notes are pretty long (more than 20 pages) but there was just so much good stuff in it that I decided to just include it all in.
9 levels of increasing embrace in ego development.pdf

@SunnyNewDay Seems to me that you have more access to other dimensions of reality than most people. Folks with psychic abilities usually experience voices and things of that sort, which they can find overwhelming at first until they learn how to manage it.
This is sorta the shaman's path. The important thing is not to misinterpret this as going crazy or as something that's wrong. You should try to see it as a blessing in disguise, a gift. But you'll have to go through some inner turmoil to fully realize how to make use of this gift for the greater good of mankind. It's a journey of self-discovery. You are discovering hidden aspects of yourself and reality. Don't expect to fit in with mainstream folks. Try to find some shamans or others with these kinds of psychic or paranormal abilities. They would be in the best position to guide you and give you advice. Personally I never experience that kind of stuff, but I know it's a real thing.
It's not that you are developing schizophrenia. Rather your mind is opening up to new dimensions of reality which are not yet recognized by mainstream culture. Become curious about these new dimensions. They might be worth exploring.

These shootings are an expected phenomena of a hyper materialistic society. As stage Orange runs its course, the limitations of Blue/Orange will become more and more apparent in the form of these kinds of ego backlashes. But this shines collective awareness on the problem, which will ultimately lead to its resolution and a transition into a stage Green society.
Banning guns will not be enough to resolve this. What's necessary is to make society more fair and to provide more opportunities and social support for alienated people.
It's an alienation problem. Alienated, nihilistic, depressed, angry, impoverished, poorly-socialized, and sexually frustrated people adopt radical and violent ideologies. Same as in the Middle East.
As stage Orange becomes more and more excessive and unhealthy, alienation will increase, violence and radicalism will increase.
When people lack a proper spiritual connection to life, they become hopeless and turn to drugs, sex, exploitation of others, and nationalist ideologies.
This is why it's important to foster a sense of community and to help those who are in bad shape. Because if they are not helped, they will not simply suffer silently by themselves, they will lash out at the world. These shootings are really a cry for help. Society is failing not only the victims of these shootings, but the shooters especially. The shooters are lashing out because they don't have proper channels for getting the love they want in healthy ways.
And of course Trump is pouring gasoline on this problem because he epitomizes toxic Orange while goading on Blue and demonizing Green.

You need to have an awakening to what Love is.
It cannot be told to you in words.
I understand your skepticism, but all happenings truly are an expression of Love. It's too epic to believe. Even when you awaken to it you will be too amazed to accept it. It's too good to be true. Yet it is Truth itself.
Psychedelics help. Take some DPT and ask it to show what is Love. Brace yourself for a mindfucking of unspeakable proportions.
The only thing capable of understanding the full extent of God's Love is God itself. A human is too tiny to fathom it. Only God understands. Fortunately, you are it!
Your awakening is not complete until you understand why you created it all. It will melt your heart with pure Goodness. It is a Goodness without an opposite.

You can't understand it without awakening. And it's too radical to explain to you verbally.
You have to stop being a self to understand it. Your self-hood is getting in the way.
Self-hood is the illusion. There simply isn't no such thing as a self. It's being imagined.
What I'm telling you is: your birth is imaginary. You were never actually born, you simply believe you were.

You can't avoid the truth of the matter.
What the scientist needs to realize is that all science is mediated through subjective experience and that it could not be otherwise. To skip over this point is the crux of problem. This is a giant epistemic oversight on their part.
The subjectivity of science is the elephant in the room that no scientist wants to acknowledge.
The very belief that science is objective is itself a subjective belief! Science is objective because one imagines it to be so.

You just have to be careful with how terms can have different meanings.
"Self-consciousness" is a mainstream cultural term, not a technical term from spirituality. Mainstream culture does not understand what the self or what consciousness is. So understanding that, when ordinary folks say "self-conscious" they are not talking about spirituality or awakening or Truth. They simply mean: a neurotic sense of social anxiety and self-judgment.
Don't be fooled by the surface similarity of terms. Just because two words look the same or sound the same does not mean they have the same meaning.
Of course the problem is not self-consciousness per se, the problem is an obsessive anxiety over one's self-image in social situations. In a sense, the awakened person is not self-conscious when he acts. He's not thinking of his self-image, he acts spontaneously. The self-conscious person self-obsesses and is stuck in monkey mind.

Name one thing which isn't in your direct experience.
I dare you.
Realize this: there is nothing but direct experience. Nor can there be.

@cetus56 The desire for Truth and understanding is independent of suffering or the quality of one's life.
You can desire to know a thing simply for the sake of knowing it, not because it will benefit your survival.
For example, you can have a desire to look inside a kangaroo's pouch even if doesn't benefit you in any material way.
And who knows? Maybe you'll find a diamond in there

That was a mild samadhi state. Good stuff. Headed in the right direction, but just the tip of the iceberg.
It is true, I am you.
But what is you?

@Truth Addict I'm trying to point you to something deeper that you can realize.
But for that to work you have to be willing to open your mind beyond what you presently know. And you have to be willing to take such existential question as "Why is reality the way it is?" seriously.
If you believe the question isn't worthwhile to contemplate, then you will get no answer and you will not even know what treasures you missed.
It's like there's a pile of flawless diamonds buried under your bed but you are too incredulous to get a shovel and dig under your bed. I'm telling you guys there's a pile of diamonds here which you have not yet discovered.

I would not use them.
The whole point of the trip is to face whatever comes up.
If your protocol is sound, you shouldn't need them.
But then again, if you're the sort of person who might freak out and do something dangerous like jump off a 20 story balcony, then you might want to have some laying around.
But even just having them around will change your trip. Your tripping will be sloppy because in the back of your mind you will know that if things get serious you can escape. This can lead you to second guessing yourself and treating tripping too lightly.
There's an important aspect of tripping where you know that once you've taken the substance, that's it -- you're all in. There's no escape. This helps the surrender process. It also helps you to think twice before tripping because you understand the gravity of the situation. This is no toy or joke.
I would rather not have an escape hatch. But that's me. You might be different.
To me, a large part of the growth I get from tripping is the seriousness of it. It's not a toy to me. And of course I learned this lesson the hard way: by going through some rough trips in the beginning. But I'm glad I did.

Inspiring story man! Keep rocking it. You're doing great for your age.

Your desire and intention for awakening & love is the most important thing. As long as you keep that desire stoked in your heart, you will find your way. It just won't be a linear path. Life will have all sorts of twists and turns in store for you.
When you find something that's truly important to you in life, latch onto it like a python and don't let go until life relents and gives you what you most desire.
The beginning is the hardest part. It will get easier.

Actually, this is false!
Experience is not experience. The very notion of experience is dualistic and corrupted by ego.
There is truly no such thing as experience. What you consider experience is a conceptual fabrication. What's really there is not experience but Being. This is not just a semantic difference. On this hinges everything.
Right now you are confused, mistaking Absolute Truth for this thing you invented and call "experience." In this way you are maintaining the fantasy that you were born. Your very life depends on not properly understanding what experience is.
Your mind will not allow you understand what I am saying here. Because if you understood what I'm saying here your entire reality would collapse and you'd have a mental breakdown.
You assume you are a biological creature inside a physical space having experiences. This is false. You have imagined: biology, space, time, experience, and your self.
Enlightenment is NOT a subjective experience. Enlightenment is the realization of Absolute Truth. At the moment of enlightenment you literally stop being a biological creature in a physical space. Because in that moment you realize that all of that is imaginary.
You literally break out of "physical reality". For the first time you see reality as it truly is. You escape The Matrix.
Imagine that your whole life has been lived inside a cartoon. And then one day you realize: "OH MY GOD! I am just a cartoon character!!!!" This means that all of science was part of the cartoon. So you cannot use science at that point to ground yourself any more. You realize that science is a hallucination.
Don't underestimate how radical this is. It is as serious as getting shot in the head. You are going to perceive it as extremely threatening.

@RendHeaven Sure, if one is lost in thoughts then such a teaching is necessary.
But then the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme where the spiritual seeker turns anti-intellectual, rejecting the mind entirely without realizing that God can speak directly through one's mind using thoughts, images, language, and even as entire manuscripts.
Most people fail to appreciate that God knows all languages in the entire universe. God is using your mind to manifest itself. Since it is formless it needs a limited formed vehicle to express itself. Mind and speech is God.
The only question is: How pure is the vehicle through which God speaks?
How pure is your vehicle? How much is your ego getting in the way?

That's right.
This thread contains a lot of people talking past one another. We have to be careful in how we define our terms and how we use different mental schemes to explain the unexplainable.
I am not really contradicting Spira or Tolle. I'm just challenging folks here to see the other side of the coin: all thoughts happen now and only now.
The problem is that thoughts are so sneaky they mesmerize you into an illusory conceptual world. This is what is meant when people say that thoughts take you out of the now. They don't actually take you out of the now because now is all there is. But subjectively they entrance you. It's like getting lost in a day dream.
Also want to challenge people here to not dismiss thoughts or mind as bad. The Absolute Now can certainly contain thoughts. Otherwise how could thoughts exist???
Elimination of thought is not strictly necessary to be in the now. Newbies commonly get the wrong idea about thought and mind, as if it is an evil that must be eradicated. I wanted to challenge that.

Again, this is part true and part false.
There is no such thing as "the natural way of doing things". Technology is always advancing. Technology is part of nature. You cannot undo technological advance. Digital reality will only grow stronger and stronger. VR socialization will soon be a big thing. Through VR socialization you will be able to make friends across the whole global, not just your local neighborhood. Digital actually allows us to transcend the limits of physicality. Think about it. That's why digital is to valuable. It's God-like.
Socrates believed philosophy should not be written but only spoken because writing would corrupt the mind. Why did he believe this? Because writing was a new invention in his day and he was set in his ways.

@Consilience There basically is no serious meditation without serious concentration ability.

The whole point of true happiness is not to base it on mood.
Imagine being happy even when you're in a bad mood. That's real happiness. And it's not easy to develop because our ideas of happiness are so mood based and survival based. Those ideas require deep deconstruction. You have to deeply grok that attachments to physical things and even emotional states always create suffering -- sometimes gross suffering, but sometimes very subtle suffering.
This was a core teaching of the Buddha. And it's a very important point which people overlook. Outwitting suffering is something only a master can do. Suffering is extremely sneaky! Because it's central to your survival. You must literally transcend the entire survival drive to access true happiness.
Awakening allows for superhuman levels of happiness.

Careful.
I know extroverts who are awakened and do spiritual practice.
And obviously many extroverts make a killing in creativity, business, art.
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
One should only be a lone wolf if that's what one is called to do. It's not necessary for success.
With that said, personally I love lone wolfing life. But that's just me. People here must find whatever kind of lifestyle resonates with them. This is a highly individualized thing.

@Mikael89 Hehe...
You must awaken to what Love is to understand these discussions. We are not talking about romantic love here.
This requires an epic enligthenment experience which will melt your cold heart.
Contemplate: What is Love?
Hint #1: it is not what you think it is.
Hint #2: psychedelics make this contemplation a lot easier.

Because you are in a contracted state of consciousness.
Also, since Love is all things, it doesn't necessarily have to be felt. You don't have to like all aspects of reality. Hatred too is a form of love.
Think about what "Everything is Love" entails. That means pain is love. It does not mean that you will never feel pain.

@RendHeaven Also, the Greeks had many gods, but one ultimate God: Zeus
Just like the Hindus have a bunch of different avatars, but one ultimate God: Shiva
When you understand this quote, you will be awake.
Consider it your Greek koan
The Greeks were no fools. They were some wise-ass motherfuckers.