fewrocker

Raise awareness Practically speaking: Meditation, inquiry, psychoanalysis, lucid dreaming

You can do both, and one will synergyze with the other. I always liked the idea of working on both sides simultaneously. Consciousness work is realizing it is all a dream, but you still have to do your best in the dream, because you awake from the dream from the inside-out. Work on awareness + work on personal development, not one or the other. You can work on both and have a smooth transition between them in which will actually reinforce one another - become a "Spiritual Gangster". In the end, I guess the consciousness work goes deeper, but you can start working on both now, and as you get awesome results, skew towards the deeper truth. Work, expand, then contract and contemplate to correct your course. Spiritual work is not a race, but a marathon, right? This notion of "if I don't drop the running right now I will be wasting time I could dedicate to consciousness work" is not very good. Over-doing consciousness work might actually trigger some backlashes and make you stuck. Take it easy, but keep questioning

Well, emotions have manifestations in your body in many ways. Chronic pain, anxiety, motivation, breathing, etc will all change in response to emotions. And the other way around also works: pain, anxiety, breathing will also have impact in your emotions. One feeds the other and that's why they can amplify themselves so much, because it works like a feedback loop. But in the sense that you're speaking, as if they are trapped, confined inside a physical location of your body, I never felt something like that. It might be a skewed manifestation of the emotions consequences in your pain body, but the emotions themselves are experiences in your brain only. The way I see it, it makes sense that you have feelings in one part of your body and not the other. But what does it mean? Do some google search and see if you find some similar stories

English is not my first language. Read only the bold text for a general idea. Fact/Force No 1: Self Actualization feels like the one true thing, the path to follow, the source of meaning and value to oneself and to all existence. It is the highest Maslow need and, as highly developed individuals, we feel attracted to pursue it Fact/Force No 2: Self actualization is threatening to the ego and constantly attacks it, since you can think and experiment the fact that the ego is a blatant illusion and it is somehow funny how we keep doing it even though its clearly ridiculous. The ego is extremely potent after all these years of conditioning and is capable of producing really horrible sensations and feelings that you are about to lose your mind/suicide, and in losing your mind you will never be able to self actualize any further. Therefore, there is an opposing force to self actualization work. Situation: Right now, I'm in a sensitive moment, living in another city, doing hard work, far from my friends and family, with not much comfort/money (it is temporary and I will be back in my city in one week, so it's not like I need to stop and go back to work on the previous levels of Maslow's needs, because I honestly got all that working already). Still, I kept a high load of self-development work, taking advantage of this new moment that I'm living, and therefore force No 2 is starting to get way too intense. The discussion: What should a self-actualizing individual do in this moment? Actively decide to numb down the SA work for a week or two and then resume it? Keep hammering it because the ego suffering is actually good to shatter the illusion even though it feels really bad? Is there a strategy/system to manage the balance between the two forces? I need some light from this brilliant community. Thanks for the insights =)

I couldn't grasp Turquoise 2 years from now, now I can. You will feel that too: realize you're developing because you can now understand more stages I wouldn't say I know a lot, but this is what I can tell you from my yellow experience, comparing to the previous stage, green: Caring about everybody, loving everybody, respecting every opinion, wanting the best for the world sounds noble and beautiful. However, it is not enough, and you will get frustrated. You will realize there is actually a next stage you can go to get closer to being able to actually make a difference in the world. You realize that to make a difference, it is not about just caring. It is about doing. However, you realize your ideas of what is going to save the world as a green person are not practical. There is way too much resistance from Orange/Blue people to make it happen. You realize that the never-ending battle between the three most common colors of today (blue, orange, green) brings the world to a stalemate, and that's why there is so much hatred, discussions and protests, but nothing seems to change. You can't promote change by just demonizing/criticizing how narrow the view of previous stages is. You realize that in order to develop the lower levels, you should not combat them, but flow with them, understand their perspectives. See where it is coming from and why it is like that. Realize that the stages are not choices of where they want to be, but just a fact to be accepted, the consequence of the actual stage of global development. See how all the stages relate to each other: where they agree and live together and where they conflict and live apart. Understanding all these dynamics is what Leo repeats again and again: Systems thinking. As a yellow person, you realize that you should stop this never-ending rant and stress, retreat into solitude, and watch. Watch the world and learn. Learn from all the dynamics of the system. Leave your meditation couch and go interact with the world and people to learn the little details. Increase your wisdom because with all the knowledge you have and your systems thinking capacity, you actually get meaningful insights. By getting the nuances of the system, you will finally detect where are the points you need to take action to actually create meaningful change, and you will see how counter-intuitive and hidden they are, and that's why it was so tough in the first place. It is as if you're training to become a hacker of the system. You will not actually do much to make the world better in this stage, but you will be developing yourself to get into a stage in which you can. And when you have a lot of wisdom but not too much action, that's when you will start to want to leave yellow, and go to Turquoise. You realize that the biggest weapon against the problems of the world is not changing a tax rate, picking the right name at an election, protesting for the right reason, but creating a paradigm shift. Increase awareness and consciousnesses in people, and the rest will take care of itself. That's why many turquoise people will become spiritual teachers.

Realize that this situation is really triggering your lower self. All this game was pulling you back to lower levels. Do what you need to do to go back to your high self. There are two main options a) If you don't see this group as being useful to your personal development: Leave and deconstruct the situation. How weird is it that they're doing that? How weird is it that you're so bothered because of this low level behavior they have? Is this being healthy to you? b) If you feel like the situation is bad, but they're kind of cool people that can push you further as a person: Reinterpret. Contemplate about the situation and realize there is not much to bother you if you're doing your development stuff, if you're spending your time well, if you're pursuing your purpose, etc. I feel like a lot of people that get stuck with a bad group of friends are giving way too much important to that group of friends, and in fact you can focus on your other pursuits, derive meaning, belonging and self-esteem from that, and then you can actually interact with the same exact group without being so triggered

Nope. I always loved music. But I guess after the SA work started, I have different ears for it now. I still listen to a lot of music to set up the tone of the moment, to introspect, to give a sense of meaning, etc. Music gives me a lot of semi-peak-experience like moments

First of all, English is not my primary language, so sorry if I'm not able to express everything clearly. During last night's sitting, some mind blowing insights came to my mind and I started shaking like hell while feeling this extremely pleasant sensation. Is this normal? Does it mean movement in the right direction? In the wrong direction? Or no movement? Insight No1: How can all this stuff come from nothing? Imagine you start with 0. Thats nothing. Now, you have +1 - 1. That still amounts to nothing, but you see some "individuals" making up that nothing, but it is still blatantly obvious that it is nothing. Then, it becomes -3 -2 -1 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 0. Still nothing, but it is getting more complex. I felt like today the equation got so complicated that it is deceiving us by being incredibly tricky to trace back to 0, so we start to believe in separateness from it. It is as if universal intelligence has found a very clever way to create something out of nothing Insight No2: The Society Struggle Imagine you are trapped inside a well. You are 100km from the bottom of the well, and you are 1km from the top surface of the well. However, there is a little problem: every time you come close to the top of the well, the well increases its size upwards by 1km. Therefore, it is infinite and you will never reach the top end. Now I ask you: in which direction would you move? Society, unconscious people keep moving upwards, believing they will reach the top. And even when they realize they can't, just keep going, because it gives this false sense that you are going somewhere. But they do not realize that if they want to get somewhere, the only way is to move downwards towards the bottom. There, you arrived. Now imagine that bottom is the nothingness, the origin of all Circles are amazing. Imagine the center of a circle is the origin of it all. The source point. The nothing. As things get more complex, we walk away from that point, and we find a circle with a radius. Now, the bottom of the well is the center of the circle. And moving outwards the center of the circle, as society does, is the journey to nowhere. It looks like it is increasing complexity, but that's it. It is still a journey to nowhere. And the problem is that this "complexity", as it increases, it becomes further away from the center, that is, the world will become less connected to its core. Insight No3: Science has got it backwards Imagine this same circle. Imagine that in a point this circle radius describes the understanding of the universe from like 3000 years ago, and lets assume that's point 0 for the beginning of math/physics. The goal of developing math, then, was to describe the universe. However, the universe needs no description. It just is. By being a human being and creating math, you are just creating further complexity compared to the complexity you have on that moment, thus expanding the circle outwards. Sure, math can explain some things from the inner circles. Actually, I would say it does not "explain", but just "describe". What good does describing something do? It just increases its complexity. It the object we call the sun has complexity +30020, calling it a sun just increases its complexity to +30023. Therefore, to really get to the meaning of stuff, it is not about the journey outwards, creating more complex models to explain the inwards. Actually, just go inwards. Ok, that was it. hahahaha. I'm more interested not in the insight content evaluation, but more on the nature of having these kinds of insight. Does that mean Im increasing consciousness? Staying in the same place? Decreasing consciousness? Does this stuff clutter my mind or help me feel connected to the nothingness?

Cool. It surely feels like that metaphor of peeling an onion. I realize it is probably just the first few layers with so many to go, but surely it feels like something. Like movement. Like all of this self-inquiry and self-actualization makes sense. I guess the biggest barrier to self-actualization for the "average" person is that it is not easy to explain. You can give traits of SA person, goals, pursuits, etc, but their level of consciousness is not able to grasp on exactly what that means. But having these experiences show you that there is surely something in there. It gives motivation to the pursuit. There could be a good discussion about what is the best way to explain the real value of SA to a person that can't connect with it the arguments we usually use

I'm still a beginner on this path. But surely it is a back and forth journey. You won't only build on top of the previous experience as if you can stack awareness on top of awareness and always go up. The good part is that by having that brief awakening, you get a glimpse that the path is making sense and that all the spiritual talk starts to resonate more with you. You know when you start all of this and you're reluctant to believe, thinking it is all too irrational, but teachers say "Well, if you want the challenge, do it and you will understand by experience" I guess you had some sort of peak experience. Did it feel like a combination of these? - loss of judgment to time and space - the feeling of being one whole and harmonious self, free of dissociation or inner conflict - the feeling of using all capacities and capabilities at their highest potential, or being "fully functioning" - functioning effortlessly and easily without strain or struggle - feeling completely responsible for perceptions and behavior. Use of self-determination to becoming stronger, more single-minded, and fully volitional - being without inhibition, fear, doubt, and self-criticism - spontaneity, expressiveness, and naturally flowing behavior that is not constrained by conformity - a free mind that is flexible and open to creative thoughts and ideas - complete mindfulness of the present moment without influence of past or expected future experiences - a physical feeling of warmth, along with a sensation of pleasant vibrations emanating from the heart area outward into the limbs.