Flammable

Bump.

High consciousness would lead towards realizing how illusory this 'self' is, therefore making self-esteem fairly irrelevant as there is actually nobody to have self-esteem and there is nobody as the target of this self-esteem.

+1

@Girzo Yeah, I was also wondering which book to buy from the list or which videos to refer to on youtube?

@Violinpracticerdude I just want to give you a hint as I was in quite a similar position as you a while back: How is it so that it is always others who are evil and deluded, but never you? Try to ponder this. You might see something there It definitely helped me see a few things I had overlooked.

@Consilience Thanks!

@Leo Gura We found their leader! Call Jordan Peterson!

@Violinpracticerdude We trust neither Leo, nor Unspirituality - mostly a gut feeling and direct experience. They (Leo & Unspirituality) are just pointers to things you might want to explore to see whether they are full of shit or not. Trusting a few sentences and believing in them will not bring you anywhere

@Shadowraix I agree. Most of the discourse on what consciousness is is simply people not really understanding how the other side of the table is using the term, thus arguing over the same concepts without seeing it.

What I can say is that sometimes all the theory truly gets overwhelming. I look at one video and then I want to watch 50 other videos, just to finally get depressed that life is not long enough to soak in all the information. Just as @kieranperez said - maybe focusing on the practice and leaving the theory aside is a good strategy.

@SageModeAustin

Would love to hear any comments from more experienced users - have found myself in a similar situation.

Maybe you could try focusing on the noise - a technique I have found to be quite successful is actually trying to carefully pay attention to all the different sounds making up the overall noise. Then your focus is on all the different constituents and your mind does not have much time/space to dive into thoughts.

@Strikr Well put into words - I have that feeling inside of me constantly or quite frequently.

There is no right thing to do. As a matter of fact, 'you' really have no control over what is happening.

As a famous proverb says: Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water. I can only assume everything happens the same way even after.

@calibrate I am already burning as you can see from my profile picture.

@Outer I am not sure how you can conduct an experiment proving that anything exists, but that would be interesting. Maybe I just cannot imagine it. Hence, I cannot see how consciousness is falsifiable - people cannot rely on anything different than their 'first-hand perspective' when doing experiments, so they cannot really go out of this perspective and prove that anything OBJECTIVELY exists.

@Violinpracticerdude I have no urge to convince you of anything - if you feel like you want a different point of view, people already wrote plenty of paragraphs describing non-dual perspectives, so have a look at them. If not, just keep your own! Both ways are fine.

@Violinpracticerdude Precisely because terms can never be the Truth If you can perceive it or conceive it, it is not IT. We stumble upon the inherent limitations of language and thought.

@Outer I do not exactly understand what you meant by falsifiable.

Scientists are just a group of people EXACTLY LIKE you - who ALSO only have the same 'first person experience' as you. Thus, it will be quite hard for them to prove anything residing out of this 'first person experience'.

By not knowing anything as you read it

@Violinpracticerdude Look up the pre-rational/post-rational fallacy.

Hello dear Leo-cultists, This is my first post in this forum - I am quite glad I stumbled upon this resource, so thank you all for being here. My question is - how do you avoid falling deep down the rabbit hole of thoughts when you are doing self-inquiry? I would sit down and start to inquire, but at some point I would find myself lost in thoughts, albeit relevant to the topic at hand. Questions like who am I? who is seeing? who is hearing the car? to whom did this thought arise? would stop my thinking for several seconds - just to then return to it a few moments later. When I try to just sit still and be aware, I almost feel as if I am going nowhere with the questioning without using reason and thought. So how do I resolve this conundrum - if I do not think, it feels as if I am going nowhere, but when I do think, it simply leads me to nowhere once again (just making my mind feel a bit better by forming a few models/concepts)?