Azrael

Yeah, after some time they really just leave your mind and come back here and there like hiccups. Then it feels like you went to sleep for let's say a day, a week or however long and currently the realization comes back and it feels like you are aware of a whole other dimension that puts everything in perspective. Let this just naturally integrate in your life, don't be afraid of losing your realizations. Act on them and let them show up themselves. Moving your body without having the sensation of moving is crazy, I have the same shit with thoughts. I'm even typically aware of 1/3 of my sleep nowadays. I have the most vivid dreams or random thoughts. It's basically like being lost in your unconscious - freaky at times. And all of this is still just the beginning my friend. I'll do some meditation as well,

See a doc, man. There are a few cases in which it can really harm the body!

That would be fun. But I'll still need a few years. I'm currently doing my Bachelor, after that I will do my Master so I'm at least occupied for the next 3-4 years. But if I go there, I probably stay for some time to really get it down.

This sometimes happens to me as well. Sometimes just a little bit and other times I think I sit completely lopsided. Basically I guess this happens when my concentration gets so high that my body tenses up and relaxes and by that starts to move. Sometimes I accept it, other times I try to balance it a little bit. In the beginning I couldn't sit for 10 minutes without rearranging myself - because of pains, these movements and what not. Now, I can mostly sit for 90 minutes w/o moving at all (consciously). So what can you do? Just follow along, if you feel like moving a bit, do that. If you feel like staying in that position, do that. The later will show you that the body at some point finds its balance again.

Currently alone. I am looking here and there for groups and stuff but haven't found one yet that I feel comfortable with. I'd like to find a cool Zen Dojo here and I probably visit a few more this summer.

I'd say 3-4. I have a few very strong rituals in place like a morning routine, my meditation, how I eat and a few other things. So in that way I'm by nature very monky. However, especially now the weather is becoming better in Germany and I find myself going out partying a lot - I have a festival coming up this month - I play Frisbee a lot (for my that's basically flowing meditation ) or I go see football with some friends like tonight. The thing is this: I don't really care any more. And I have seen for myself that primarily my body decides when it wants to live very monastic and when not. For example if I learn for my exams - it's typically a 6 week period - I'm mostly at home for myself, I learn 6 hours a day and meditate 2-4 hours. In this time I'm automatically very monky. But right now, seemingly not. I live in a city - Berlin - in which you can have a lot of fun. And I chose to have a lot of fun now in my twenties because you cannot do that any more when you are older then 30. It's not the same. I know older people and they don't have as much fun getting wasted and doing stupid shit. So I balance doing stupid shit with a lot of learning and living my passion (computer science) and getting more conscious through meditation. But basically I don't engineer that, it just happens to be that way. For my future I want to live a lot more monastic, however. If I'm through with my studies and had my childish fun the plan right now is to either go to Canada, get a nice place, work a little and have a lot of free time for meditation in the most beautiful nature or to go to a place like Antaiji for a few years. Maybe I first go there and then Canada. I'd like that. We'll see what the future brings. But I'd like to at least spend 10 years very dedicated to this work w/o much distraction. Then you can come back, tell others, reintegrate and do some other shit. But the older I get and the more I progress, the less fun I have and playing this normal life. That's my thoughts on this.

Your awareness will naturally raise. Don't worry about that. If you just sit down every day and meditate, inquire your own nature and get in touch with your intuition this just comes by. It's like when you are running 6 miles every day for the next year you will be a professional runner at some point nevertheless who you are. But it takes some time. So just go on. For me personally I was very occupied with the thought "what if I do this wrong / what if I go in the wrong direction / what if .." for the first year doing this and it seems to me that you have to go along that road for some time to get to the realization that there is actually nothing you can actively do to push it, to get it, to get in there. Then you try to "not do" all of this and trying to get it that way. Doesn't work as well. At some point you just say: "Fuck all this, I don't give a shit." At that point - which you can't actively create - it comes to you. At least that was a major shift on my journey. So, to be practical for you: Keep your meditation up, whatever works for you. For me it is "Do Nothing" + strong determination sits. For others it's mindfulness, self-inquiry. You know the techniques. They can all expand your awareness which is ultimately needed to go from an intellectual hypothesis to an experiential proof / change of mind. Plus investigate how you think, where thoughts come from, how you are reacting in certain situations. Get to know yourself as deeply as you can, connect with your intuition and get in flow with life. The rest comes when it is time. Cheers

No, if you put it that way you make enlightenment something achievable and the act of resting in awareness as a right behaviour that one needs to hold up. What @cetus56 has found out for himself, what I am realizing and what you @Teags will realize as well when you have looked into yourself and the nature of reality for some time is that you are in this very moment exactly as you should be, that you couldn't be any other way and that you as a "believed and envisioned" entity are not responsible for all of what you do. It's more like what you think you currently are is a the thought of self that is present in some moments - while in others it is just not there or semi-present. This can been very clearly seen with enough awareness - which also can't be produced but let's say given the space to develop through meditation - and then by clearly seeing this you will naturally and calmly rest in awareness - as you always did, as you will always do. The difference is that if you look a movie for 20 years straight, think you are the very main character and you know it's gonna be fucking ending in 60 years you will be highly miserable if you don't realize that you just sit in a cinema watching it. Enlightenment is your buddy that comes at you and says: "Whuu, wake up, idiot." - But you still sit on your seat as you always did.

I've done "counting" for a few weeks - maybe a month - and had a lot of great meditations with it. I did - I don't know - probably 7-8 months of "Do Nothing" in beforehand and"counting" seemed to get me into the "no-thought"-realm way easier. However, I stopped that after a few weeks - basically because my local Zen people let me in on the fact that although counting meditation let's you into the no-thought realm very early on - it doesn't support purging shit out of your system and confronting your own "self" like when you are "doing nothing". And so I stopped doing it and I could see their point very clearly. "Do Nothing" will eventually bring you to the most marvellous inner states when it's time to get there. In beforehand - it will purge the shit out that's needs to be purged. You have to decide what you want here. If you just want a very calm, nice and fresh meditation, counting or mantra meditation is the best stuff I know personally. If you want to progress spiritually - sit yourself down in front of a wall and just sit. It will freak you out and this is exactly what it should do until it gets you back to the point where you sincerely love doing this. Anyway, cheers!

Seems like you're doing pretty good with your meditation. Just go on. A lot of sits may come easy, others come harder. It's a flowing process of struggles, fights, peace and integration with yourself that will slowly calm you in every little part of your being and provide the wisdom to naturally turn in the right direction. And that doesn't always have to be that you change a whole lot of your life - yes this may come as well - but basically you see that every rule, definition and abstraction that you make out of yourself is basically a movie in a television next to a real world that just does it's thing. And as this distinction gets clearer and clearer you see that next to this TV you basically get hit with emotions to completely get involved in it and forget to see that it is just a fucking hallucination. In that way you and we all are really the highest form of nature known to man. We are still it in every neurotic thing we get involved in. You are nature looking at yourself, having built this highly intelligent computer called brain to forget yourself and play a lifetime that you are not yourself, just because you want the experience of being lost. The whole rest of nature knows it is it. Look at the trees, the ground, animals. They all act spontaneously as it happens. We humans are able to play the other side, so we do. Meditation let's you in on that in a first person experiential context. That's my my thought on this.

I don't desire to change the world. I desire to find my inner peace and have a good time. I think the only way to really help this world is to stop trying to change it for the better but focus that you yourself do good. In that way you would help a lot more if you ask me.

Note quite. You could still worry about your past or future while being completely centred in the here and now. Being present basically means that you are aware of what happens right now, you just notice. And whatever comes, happens. If you hear a car outside, it happens, if your ass hurts from sitting all the time, it happens, if you have a naughty thought, it happens.

I mean that a non-neurotic human being would work on his issues only if he has the resources to do so. If he has an inner feeling that he wants to change the way he eats, wants to go out more or what ever he follows through on that notion because it is natural to do so. He doesn't cut off his whole "unhealthy" lifestyle from one day to the next to fit some mental masturbation concept for a few days until his will collapses and he has to stop. He kind of relaxes into the situation and intuitively feels out what to do. That doesn't mean that everything comes easy for him or that it isn't hard to quit a bad habit. But he so chooses to take on the challenge because his whole body wants to and will support his decision. Do you know certain people who eat extremely healthy and have no problems not eating candies or bullshit all the time? Or people who are very charming, very sporty, involved in an art or something similar. All of them - at least in this field of their life - follow through a natural notion and seem to master it with little effort - what for you would maybe be not achievable. That's natural, that's using free energy that your body provides to go with your inner flow.

Where is the problem? Have fun, man! My wasteful hobbies (so that you feel a little bit better): Binging on series in the evening (right now it's Homeland), my buddy SWIM likes to go party from time to time way too to hard and smokes pot here and there, being addicted to meeting people here and there just to talk your ego off and feel good, a little bit TV before I sleep, cutting meditation minutes here and there if I have a full schedule, going to festivals and having the time of my life, being addicted to music while being in the underground or the bus, being an arrogant piece of shit for fun and probably 10,000 other things. I don't really mind them, I love most of them to be honest. It's my element of unrespectable rascality - my salt. Don't beat yourself up for not living like a monk. If you want you can shift slowly in this direction - I clearly want to do that - but it takes time and effort to wash out all the shit society has implanted in you.

Great, but make sure you don't take this as your new dogma. Dreams and wishes are very fucking important in some cases. For example for your life purpose. You need a long-term vision in your life in many aspects to really have a fulfilling life that develops over time. However, you are also right that living in wishy-land all the time just makes you frustrated. I think every human being has his or hers core-failures (or we might call it so). Like for example you are a little too overweight, you smoke a little too much pot, you want to be better in university etc. And it seems that even if you take massive action against one of these core-failures that are kind of integral for you - in the long run you don't cut them lose. This is mainly because you trying to end a symptom that came out of being neurotic and not calm and trying to solve it with the same kind of behaviour. A non-neurotic human being wouldn't even care too much if he is a little overweight, smokes a little bit to much pot or could have better grades. He would probably still want to work on some of that but only if it feels natural and if it's the time to do so. Most of my unwanted habits fell off when I lowered my level of neurosis (through meditation) or I just stopped caring about them and really saw how they make me. And it's a funny thing that in that very situation they start to melt away because you stop opposing them. Cheers

SWIM used to do DMT a couple of times last year and had some interesting experiences with it. He did it after researching psychedelics a lot intellectually and then experientially. He had the most eye-opening experiences with DMT - this will probably change your views on a lot of subjects if you approach it in a spiritual way. However he also has to note that in the long run psychedelics (Acid, DMT, Shrooms) are more like the candy of this whole game. They don't shortcut your journey and they won't have such a lasting effect as meditation - not at all. But if you want to have a mystical experience .. try it. SWIM still does it here and there if he has time and nothing to do but it seems like you do this for some time and then just stop or just use it for cleaning your psyche from bullshit on occasions. So yeah, have a try if you want. DMT - if you asked SWIM - is probably the coolest / weirdest / mind-opening thing you can do on this planet. You don't find anything that is even remotely similar. To really get your spiritual journey going: meditate, read up on topics, think about them, inquire. Cheers,

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I guess it depends what your poster shows. I think this is a very good idea, dude! Thanks for sharing. If I think about death I always come to the conclusion that I deeply don't want to give a fuck at all what other people think about me and I guess this is one of the biggest things holding me back. Even though one might be self-confident, mindful and what not ... this society is so damn good to root that inside your psyche + you are wired that way. So I guess if I had a poster seeing someone falling from a beautiful cliff in nature - looking down and realizing he will be dead in a few seconds - with a text saying "How much does your WhatsApp-Picture matter now?" it would have a very good effect on my psyche - or something according to that. Fuck, I maybe do this. Thanks a lot you inspired me!

I personally meditate with eyes open for more then 10 months now - I don't really track - but I can tell it's a good idea. That way you can really practice "just to sit" without trying to do something. Not even closing your eyes, getting lost in it - but just sit and be. And personally from doing this - I experienced the most normal, pissed-off, bored, highly spiritual, fucking transcending to completely loving sits. If you do this for some time all of these situations will present them to you. And first-off you will try to go for the "spiritual", "loving" nice ones. Because you really think that's the meditation you want. So one does that for a while until you find out .. the hard way .. that there is just nothing you can really do to provoke a good meditation. It just seems that it really doesn't matter how much you want it but that it always decides for itself whether you are in flow or not. So you begin to lean back, understand that and finally just take what comes. And the storm will just go further: good, bad, random, mediocre. But you will sit there knowing that this is exactly the flow they call .. life, Tao, it, nature. However you call it. And that's it.

"When tired sleep, when hungry eat".

Dude, chill. When you get into deeper states of meditation a lot of auditory and visual hallucinations will come up. I hear these humming sounds a lot, it's just your brain making this up. In Zen they call this Makyo. It's nothing special, just ignore it or use it to get even deeper.

Basically you'll encounter a lot of strange things on this journey because you - the ego - will begin to break down and more layers of bullshit get cut through from month to month. The game between being in peace and going back to sleep is one that will follow you through for some time. I have whole phases of like weeks and months in which I feel completely enlightened and I have other ones in which I am completely asleep and suffering a lot. Having this for some time basically tells you that neither the phase of peace nor the phase of sleep is something you want to constantly manifest or get rid of. Because this doesn't work this way. Life is peace and sleep, terror and love. What will change is that awareness will develop around these things and you see how they "play with each other" - so you transform to a state of seeing through this and this calms you down a lot. So, everything normal here. Just go on. Have fun!

Yeah, I've had that experience. Nowadays, I sit completely still. The only times I'm moving is when my body unconsciously does so a little bit. But this develops over time.

Yeah, basically you can straighten it a little bit. But don't do it every two minutes or so. When you meditate for some time your back will stay in the right position or you have to adjust it just once or twice a little bit. The main pain with strong determination sits comes in my experience from your legs, hips and lower back. And your body feels like a rock if you don't move for some time. So try to move as little as possible.

joined