Markus

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Everything posted by Markus

  1. @Guivs Interesting. For how long have you practiced?
  2. @Guivs Have you personally experienced lucidity in dreamless sleep?
  3. Great question. I used to have a list a year ago but haven't read it in ages. I'll just try spontaneously and see what I come up with. consciousness understanding open-mindedness honesty/authenticity discipline courage health Well, you're gonna have to accept 7. I figured I'd also thinking about how I'm living up to them. Consciousness - well, I meditate 2-4 hours a day, try to stay aware of being aware during daily activities as well, with fluctuating success. I guess an indicator of growth is seeing just how unconscious I am. Understanding - I may intellectually understand or at least try to understand others, and different things in the world, but mostly I discard this value just so save time. Open-mindedness - I'm quite dogmatic. I think I'm less dogmatic than 99% of people. Tells you how dogmatic people are, or how much of a self-absorbed idiot I am;) I'm open to new ides if they make some sense to me, but often when people give me advice etc, I easily discard it as I see them trapped in "shoulds" and seeing what one ought to do in life as a specific thing rather than a system of functioning. Honesty - I do catch myself trying to get away with a few blatantly obvious lies to other people each week. I probably lie to myself more but don't quite realize it. I often see how I omit things, not that It'd be a moral problem but I just am reluctant to speak about things as I think people will judge me. Discipline - Oh lord. I suck at this one. I should be on a 2-hour walk asking "Am I aware?" (functions basically the same as Maharshi's "Who am I?" except Rupert Spira thinks it's less confusing an more direct) but here I am posting on this forum, flaunting my ego. Just two more points and I'll stop it, I promise. Courage - suck at this too. Rationalize why I should focus on being aware, as if it contradicted being courageous. Health - Working on it. But shitty food tastes too damn good. Have a hard time giving it up, plus my commitments with regard to food have never been strong. Here.
  4. I have to say I'm jealous of people who've reached that point. From your perspective of course it might be pretty awful, who knows. But from an outside perspective, it's like: shit, he's making progress!
  5. Do you mean to say that you get sucked into these thoughts and lose self-awareness and then have this "oh" moment where you realize you've been distracted? If yes, then that's indeed not helping your meditation. I'd logically think that meditating on thoughts/emotions would be the best targeted approach to try to resolve this.
  6. If you want enlightenment, everything else is gonna be a distraction, especially some kind of pursuit of changing yourself. If you watch Leo's "real growth vs fake growth" video, you might perhaps see that the desire to become good with girls is a sort of an overcompensation for your insecurities with them. I do have the same issue. But thinking that compensating that and "fixing yourself" is going to make you happy is a delusion. The only reason someone would choose girls over enlightenment is out of ignorance.
  7. The fear of us no longer being a certain way, or appreciating something, is hilariously absurd, if you think about it. From your current perspective, you're afraid you'll no longer care for something. But when you no longer care, there isn't a problem. It's like if I were to say: thank god I am straight, women are so much more attractive than men. You see how that works?
  8. You should watch this: Enlightenment is an aspect of "Waking up" while the stages are an aspect of "Growing up". Interesting video. Also talks about "Showing up" and "Cleaning up" (shadow work).
  9. If that were the case, I'd be a Buddha by now.
  10. Spiritual work gradually teaches you how to be happy now. The point is that you should not look for happiness as some kind of future event. As the ever-present peace in the background starts to illuminate, you will have a growing experiential understanding of this. Let's put it this way: meditation trains your mind to stop looking for happiness in the future and be happy now. You cannot meditate with the goal of becoming happy because by definition you're supposed to allow experience to be as it is. Meditation as an activity is not one where you seek happiness. You may intellectually believe it is going to make you happier over time and that is quite true, but as you are meditating, in the moment, you're not having the mindset of looking to attain something that isn't there now, and if there is, you just observe it like any other phenomena.
  11. I have two basic ideas, no idea how good they are in the big picture. The first one is from a long period of trial and error, the second one is something I've yet to test. 1. Have a disciplined schedule where things to do are put down, not only by order but also by the time at which you do them. It's hard to fool that system - you either do the things or you fail. 2. Investigate into the "struggling" to do something. Acknowledge that what you end up doing is precisely what you want to do. The struggle between you and low-consciousness forces is bullshit. The low-consciousness shit you do is what you want to do. As you acknowledge that, look into what the reasons behind doing what you do are.
  12. Sleep ain't gonna give you the benefits of meditation. That said, if you meditate for an hour a day or less, you should absolutely be able to prioritize in a way that allows you to both meditate and get enough sleep. I personally do settle for 7 hours of sleep instead of 8 if that means I can contemplate for 4 hours instead of 3, or 3 instead of 2.
  13. They do come from your own mind, conscious and subconscious (which I guess is the significant thing here). I've never really dealt with interpretation though. I mean, sure, some things are really clear, but usually my dreams are just trippy stuff I don't bother analyzing.
  14. I have the same issue. I resent my family, for dozens of things. I've made two bigger attempts to honestly express that resentment. The first time I got called "manipulative" and the second time "ungrateful". I don't know what the fucking solution is, or if there even is one. To give up thinking they should be different and do this and not do that would probably be a good step. Give up trying to justify what you do, is another thing. Its useless to get caught up in arguments over petty shit.
  15. A no-nonsense description of the nature of experience, the ego and enlightenment, the relative and the absolute, in a way that couldn't be simpler, through brilliant analogies. A must-read for anyone who is trying to get their arms around what enlightenment is and isn't, and how their current experience is keeping them from reaching it. Don't let the repetitiveness and seeming simplicity make you think you should skim over this - repetition is essential for intellectually grasping something. This book does not go into detail about techniques for pursuing enlightenment.
  16. Here is something interesting than has occasionally crossed my mind. The self, a subject/object distinction, develops somewhere in early childhood. My earliest memory seems to be something that doesn't contain a "me" (and the only one that doesn't, in fact), it is just a memory of two pigs eating. It's allegedly been researched that people generally don't remember events without the event involving "them" doing something, which could be one of the reasons there are basically no memories from early childhood - in the period where the child could already use language but didn't perhaps have such a strong sense of self. Wouldn't it perhaps be true that the sense of self, as it gets constant reinforcement, continues strengthening itself all throughout life? It certainly seems to me that middle-aged and elderly people are considerably more stubborn than people of my own age (late adolescence). From this I would hypothesize that older people will have more layers of bullshit to work through, if they try to pursue enlightenment, and will thus have a path of more suffering, on average. The reason this even caught my interest is because there is all this talk about the emotional labor of doing self-inquiry. I just finished a 2.5-day home retreat of doing it and wouldn't say it were so bad. Yes, I did have occasional bouts of hatred and resentment towards other people and at one point seemingly every object come up but nothing worse than I've experienced in 45-minute sessions of simple meditation. The other thing that I already have once made a thread about, but what certainly confirmed itself, is that I rarely experience the self coming up with answers to "What am I?" I get into a deep state of meditation where I can inquire "What am I?" and silently wonder (Which is great, I guess, but certainly doesn't trigger an enlightenment experience). I was walking on a footpath while doing that. Yet as soon as a person would approach me, I could feel the self-activity re-emerge. It's almost as if I'm paranoid about self-inquiry not working because it seems too easy.
  17. I'm interested in hearing what you guys'n'gals think or know about TM (any personal experiences etc.) So this morning I happen to be on a little research tour about exploring some different forms of meditation than I've already tried or heard about. I did 5 minutes of research about TM and my first impression is - isn't it just a bs marketing scheme? The technique is described as simple and effortless. You close your eyes, get comfortable and focus on a mantra for 20 minutes. But wait a minute, you need a qualified instructor to give you your personal mantra, as well as give you a 3-hour course, to make sure you're doing it right and using the right mantra. And to hear about all the supposed benefits. A simple mantra meditation that anyone could learn on their own + marketing hype and complication making things sound complicated = TM?
  18. The problem is not thinking per se, but thinking without knowing that you're thinking. So when you think "Oh, there I went again! Jeez!" you know that you're thinking.
  19. What's the big difference, even? Meditation + "What am I?" = self-inquiry. I would in any case consider self-inquiry a meditation technique. If you seem to lack focus in self-inquiry, practicing a mindfulness technique on the side might be useful. Self-inquiry is meant to bring about an enlightenment experience by exhausting the preconceptions of the mind and giving an insight into your true nature being awareness. I imagine it would take quite a while to start grasping the fundamental nature of experience through mindfulness. At the same time, once you do, the experience will probably be deeper, easier to re-access. But the last part is just speculation using my logic - I have no idea whether that would actually be the case. I just presume that enlightenment from self-inquiry is faster and more about spontaneous luck whereas enlightenment from mindfulness alone is slower and is about being able to dissect your experience to the point where you see through the illusion of the separate self moment-by-moment.
  20. Well, when you rub the tip of the penis with your palm you can perhaps experience so much pleasure you'll find it very hard to keep going. There's a technique for you. We can call it "strong determination rubbing" - masturbation on steroids.
  21. Alright so I'm awfully inflexible, have knee pain (medial) and neck pain, and have been procrastinating for two years doing anything serious about it. It's time to change that. I want to have a better meditation posture plus get back to the gym to lift weights. Any advice/resources to increase flexibility in general, or more specifically for a total beginner, would be welcomed. Especially some routines or something like that. Mobility WOD (https://www.youtube.com/user/sanfranciscocrossfit/videos) is a great resource, as well as the book "Becoming a Supple Leopard". However that'd be better suited probably for someone who is already athletic and tackling specific mobility issues. If one were to ask me which of my muscles are tight...umm...all of them, I'd say. So something general to help that would be good.
  22. The Topic How a high level of moral development functions without clear rules and judgements ("Thou shalt/shalt not"). What I want to know Why and how having moral values and making moral judgements limits one's Self-Actualizing. What is the alternative to making moral judgements? How can one live without them? Why this tideo? You have previously mentioned how having rules actually belongs to a low level of moral development, and that with enough awareness morality becomes effortless, or something along the lines of that. I think it's important to share this view with the world as pretty much nobody could comprehend such possibility and is therefore stuck in moralizing and judging. Moral judgements are some of the most prevalent and toxic ones people make. An insight into how there's a radically different approach one could take would be a tremendously important one, up there with the insight of no free will or how much one lies.
  23. @John Thank you for the encouragement. I really appreciate it.
  24. @ULFBERHT That's probably good advice. I guess I'll have to identify what my worst areas are and start to work on them. As far as pain goes, my two key problems are medial knee pain and pain around the tibia. I figured the medial knee pain is probably from a lack of external hip rotation, which when meditating cross-legged can make the shin move sideways to compensate, squeezing the medial meniscus between the thighbone and shinbone. Any stretch I tried to do for external rotation caused pain in that area though. I remembered a banded distraction where I rotate my hip outwards with the leg straight, I'll try that out. As for the tibia, it seems like my ankle range is terribly restricted. Yet the issue is, I can't really mobilize it without the pain acting up. Perhaps that is from a weak foot, or tight calves. I'll try to tack some of those tissues with a lacrosse ball for a few weeks, see if it gets any better. I've also found I have really tight hamstrings, which is probably what ended up causing me pain when squatting, deadlifting or doing bent over rows, dealing with that should be pretty straightforward.
  25. From what I know, for the general well-being of the planet, veganism is better than vegetarianism, since you don't consume anything from factory-farmed cows or chickens. If you care about the ethics of animal consumption, same answer. Health wise, strict vegetarianism or veganism is not necessary, though one should consume less animal products and considerably more fruit and vegetables than most people do.