Azrael

Yes, it's just progress. Just keep on digging. You'll naturally come to the point at which the sense of being "put in your current situation" turns into you are manifested "as this situation" and are in inevitable relationship with your environment. From this the sense of separation slowly leaves and it develops a kind of relaxation into every moment you are in and a sense of flow that arises. But it takes some digging to unveil this. So keep at it. At some point you go through experiences that take away the possibility of not pursing this anyway. It's like you climbed a hill for some time and behind it you see a city of gold and you are coming from the slums. You never go back there.

In my understanding this is one of the fastest ways and I think you got something wrong here when saying one needs effort to stay on the Taoist way. I'd rather look at it as the fool that just lets himself swim by the stream of life, kindly playing with the water. While seeing everyone else trying to get in the other direction (up the water) and not only drowning but being really unhappy trying this. The Taoist - in my understanding - has fully realized that there is no difference between him and his surroundings and that these surroundings really make him as he is. If you get this down, it not only is quite a release to see but also complete peace to have. And you don't need to be consciously ever-present to follow this, because you are ever-present in every situation anyway. If you think, that happens now. If you do something, that happens. Whatever you do, that happens now and can only happen now. The Taoist's attitude is to see that and relax a little bit into the situation and intuitively manage his life. It's a really beautiful approach - in my view - and it brought me so far the best results on my own journey. Because, ask yourself this: When will you accept that seeking enlightenment won't bring it to you and start embodying it's principles? If you do that, it seems to naturally manifests in your life more and more.

They ultimately aren't. That's the point. An animal, you could say, is a consciousness expressing itself in a higher complexity then maybe plants. And humans are again a little higher in complexity (when we are alive) then animals. As the body dies, it's complexity goes does down - because it doesn't do anything anymore - and goes back to the earth, maybe becomes dust and what not. And at an other place consciousness begins to get more complex again. One could see it that way. This also transcends your view of ethics. There are no god-given ethics. Look around, you won't find any rules hanging from the trees. Now, one could ask: Why are Buddhists for example then so nice all the time? Because they found out how to lower their amount of suffering by choosing the middle way and not bathing oneself in pleasure or not-doing to achieve this goal. But a real Buddhist knows very well that this is an idea and not the rule of eternity.

Okay, this clarifies your result a little bit. Whouh, I thought you sat in a cross-legged posture. I did several 120 minutes sits in Burmese posture and was on the verge of puking / fading / crying / screaming because of the pain and mental stuff. But hey, cheers to you. 6 hours must have been really hard on your mind, just sitting and doing nothing. That's more then incredible. Have a drink on that, or two.

Yes, in some phases this happened. During the meditation and / or after. But it's not as linear as that. For me it is/was very cyclic. In the first year of doing this I had several phases of real brutal monkey mind, deepest fears coming up etc. I had times in which I was completely convinced that I'm mentally ill and that this is probably going to stay, just because of the intense purging of shit out of my system. I'm very lucky that I didn't give up and that I pushed it even harder. Right now, I'm experiencing the fruits of this work. But this takes time and I will have at least a few more very brutal phases in front of me. But you learn to manage them on the way. Just go on. It's all progress.

http://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/2328-mind-attacks-after-initial-seeing

Had the same thing after an initial seeing back in November 2015. After 3 weeks of complete silence, joy and being identified with pure knowing, I had 2-3 months of complete horrors. That's normal, just go on. You'll learn to live with that on the way + if you had this a few times it looses power and you'll just relax into it either way. If you really learn to manage this, it can be a quick way into deeper realizations. @Ayla wrote a beautiful post about the topic:

Find something you are deeply passionate about. Something that brings you really in flow and is worth putting 10,000 hours in to become a master of it. For me it's definitely programming - or solving complex problems in a algorithmically manner - and meditation. If I am ever lonely, what I'm kind of never because I love the silence, I return to these two passions of mine that light up my heart poetically speaking or get me working pragmatically speaking. You get the drill here. Find something that is worth doing with your time.

Wisdom to my ears. Also, if you really realized structures and behaviors of your psyche you can help people that are not so far - not by directly teaching to them - but by making them realize certain things. That's one of the most pleasurable things to do, because you look like a magician to them and you know for yourself that you really got it down. Because if you can make somebody realize something out of blue by phrasing it in a certain way and using some brains twists, you really had to understand it first.

The trick here is to be very precise w/ your posture. You maybe wanna sit in something like Burmese posture, quarter / half lotus if you can (I can't) and have a straight back. That means, you want to lean a little bit on your knees and push your after a little bit away as if it tried to see the sun. You can look up the Zazen posture, this I found is one of the best ways to sit. This should help you. Keep your eyes open and look in a 45 degree to the ground / wall or whatever you see in front of you. I get sleepy sometimes but it is mostly connected with prior activities, like working out.

Cheers to you. Great that you got your dream job! The fear gets me a lot, that's why I wrote this post. My relationship with these kind of emotions is very cyclic, sometimes it feels like I know what they are and so I can keep it down, other times they overwhelm me. What seems to develop over the time is a kind of smile - a kind of knowing that even when you are in deep fear and your mind is all fed up, you know it's just a game and even though you suffer you just go through it. The more you do that you kind of automatically let go of it and it becomes just a part of your experience like everything else. And that's the drill here. Fear is my number one teacher. And the fastest one, also.

Yesterday night I had a really interesting meditation insight that maybe can help you with this issue. I was sitting and after some time I got bored, my back hurt a little bit and I got into that "I want to get away from this"-attitude. Also couldn't focus as well. So, I merged with this uncomfortableness and it just popped in my mind that no matter what I do in life this perspective of "there is something wrong and I need to do something about that" never goes away. For example I moved to a new apartment a few months after living in a shared flat and I really didn't like that. So my mind began to spin all kind of ideas that I have to get out, and this is not what I want in life and it is so bad ... So I got out into a real nice apartment. Now, living here for a few months my mind is long after its peak of happiness because of the moving and starts to bug itself about other things again. And I just noticed last night very intuitively that not only everything is really okay in 99% of all your situations and every bugging of yourself is highly over-exaggerated, but that it's not the actual circumstance that makes you bug yourself - but it's just a social conditioning, a pre-defined pattern that comes back every time applying itself on the new "ground". What I then did is just that I connected to knowing - basically to the sense that you exist right in this very moment (for me I go with my attention in my belly and feel that I'm really here) - and I began to "put love to this negative pattern" and innerly smiled about it. I didn't start to get away from it, because that is just itself playing tricks to get even more fucked up, but I just included it into "me" and began to love it. (I admit I'm guilty of watching a lot Matt Khan stuff, and I tell you I'm a critical computer science major but this really works.) So yeah, realize it's not the actual pain or emotional reaction that is the problem. The problem is that you react to that in the first place neurotically. If you get rid of this notion, suffering is really just pain and pain is really just a warm centralized sensation in your body that feels amazing if you feel it the first time w/o bad thoughts in the back of your mind. It's like you are the cathedral (your body) and great music, dramas and plays are playing in it. And how do you get rid of this this negative notion of making up problems. A lot of strong determination sits (retrains the nervous system or at least feels like that) and Matt's love. Hope that helps.

So you and I are not actually living? I experience, so I guess I actually live. Did that forever.

@mikeyy Everything perfectly fine, just go on.

Can you feel how you perceive this moment right now? Like, not what you see or hear but just the fact that you are perceiving something. Even if you think you are identified with your head and what not, you can sense that as you are reading this, there is something, isn't it? Now, as you quite rightly pointed out a lot of stuff is always changing and it is kind of uneasy to put that into a concept of what does really exist and from which perspective speaking and so on. But ask yourself this: Has the way you know, perceive, experience things ever changed? Like, of course the contents always change and when you are drunk or have fun your perception changes a lot - but the knowing, kind of like the potential that let's all this content exist - this current happening of every moment you have - has this ever changed? That is for real, my friend. This is a lot more real then you see yourself right now. And this is something that will never come up as a experience but is pleased to allow every experience into existence so that you can play around with it. And you can play dump, say you're not it and you have to wait until one day it comes all down to you and you're enlightened like it's written in the books, or you notice the odd fact that if you are really earnest with yourself, you know who you are. Cheers,

Thanks! I enjoy writing about this a lot. Basically, for me I had phases in which my insecurities amplified like nuts because my awareness began to build up and I firstly saw how much "shit is on me". So when that happened my meditation was infiltrated with tons of bullshit thoughts, really crazy ones, I was depressed, felt shitty and every fear I had amplified even more. It was really horrible. On a daily basis. That's I'd say one of the first points that decides whether you'll stick or not. Because it's heavy. I read up an intellectual framework about enlightenment, so I knew this was coming and that I just needed to go through that. These phases alternated always with ones in which I felt completely connected, in flow, dancing with life. This was a kind of crazy first year, I gotta say and I'm very grateful that I have the time and resources to go through that, understand and integrate it. Now, I had some experiences in which I saw glimpses of it and I try now to deepen that because I know where to look so to speak. But this is something that just came up when my awareness deepened. You have to first de-hypnotize yourself with meditation, self-inquiry or whatever else works for you and then you notice it spontaneously or an experienced teacher gives you a very direct pointer that leads you onto it. This is the way it worked / works for me. And now, I'll go that road deeper and deeper and look what comes up and how much I can integrate myself.

"Do Nothing" + strong determination sits seem to look so easy to you on the surface but you don't see what they bring up. These simple practices put you through a lot of cycles of "now you see it" / "now you don't". And in the latter one you sometimes think you get mentally ill from this work. So yes, it's brutal at times up to the point where you built up enough awareness so that you notice there is something that is ever-present. And then you investigate that and it seems that it is the only no-thing that can be you and that it was "always in front of you". And when that point is reached, you get it why some people say: "There is nothing you can do to see it. Because the very thing you really have to do to see it, is stop wanting to see something and then notice what remains." But to come to this realization a lot of de-hypnotization needs to be done for a lot of people (me included). When this happened, life and this journey becomes a lot easier. Within this journey so far I had 7/8 months of complete terror and I'd say 4-5 months of silence and bliss so far. I needed the terror and it was brought up by "Do Nothing" and strong determinations sits to build the awareness.

Haha, no I mean your inner voice. You are completely identified with this voice right now, meaning that you really deep down think that there is this entity that thinks this thoughts, right? Like, I mean even if we are all mindful and all of that stuff, don't you really feel yourself when you talk to yourself? Yeah guess what, that's an illusion. If you talk to yourself sub-vocally - if you think - and have the sensation of doing that, you are basically tricking yourself into believing that there is this entity from which these thoughts really come from. And what I'm telling you here is basically that these are two thoughts at the same time, tangled with each other. The first thought is what you are thinking and the second is that you are talking to yourself. You can get to the point where your awareness is so sharpened that you untangle this and see it right away. And now, can you believe how stunning this is? And then, if you go deeper and deeper you will begin to notice how everything intuitively manifests in this awareness, this underlying knowing that is always there. Your sight, sounds, your thoughts, your limited view of yourself, this very moment that you experience. And if you begin to see that, you will never go back, but deepen that for the rest of your life. Cheers and good night from Berlin,

Yip, I live in Berlin. The city of dreams. Just kidding. No, I never went to a real retreat. I am looking forward to do that in the future a lot more. But I just do it with myself. And I can visit Zen dojos if I want to every day. I had such a messy mind myself for a long period of time, still have it sometimes. But basically it's a lot more relaxed now. Find out first that you have no power at all to change what you think. Investigate that until you have thoughts coming up w/o the sensation of talking to yourself sub-vocally. When that happened the first time to me, it was breath-taking. It was in a meditation after I watched Leo's "Free Will" video. Will never forget this day. From then on it kinda cooled itself down a lot because I just now that if I try to change it in any way, it's just a thought plus another thought carrying the sensation of I.

Yep, you can do that. It's amazing. You will just see your intuition do all the talking. It feels like being heavily in flow. I meditate 1 hour per day. If I have time I do another hour in the evening or sometimes I do little retreats with 3-4 hours a day.

Nope, intense mindful looking is still putting this "clear and undistorted view" on top of what you really perceive. Ask yourself why you can't hold that undistorted view more than a few seconds. If you really want to develop being-perception find that which is not changing in every situation. Go through life and compare all kinds of situations, all perceptions, feelings and thoughts and look for the constant notion that is always there. Then merge with that. Took me a good year to be able to find and do that. But you will get to the point where the color of your vision, the sound of everything and every sense in general amplifies like it's ridiculous. It's like you're creating a world every moment that is way to astonishing. If you really get this down, you break together and cry out of joy, it is that powerful. No kidding. So, if you really want do develop this, "Do Nothing". The rest comes by itself. You'll also come to the place where you meditate in every situation. Being becomes your new reality. It is like the background that was always there now comes into the picture.

Since birth? Who told you this? If everything you tell yourself what you are comes up in awareness, how do you want to make a statement about what awareness is, if what you think you are is a product of it? Investigate that.

Who wants to become enlightened when you ask that question? Who is this entity? Find that before you enlighten it.

Nope, dig deeper. What is present when you are fed up in thoughts, present-minded, in action, sleeping? What is constant about all these experiences?

And I think we have an understanding.