BipolarGrowth

@Muhammad Jawad no problem man ? Equanimity is definitely a worthy goal

Life just happens and you (meaning the sensations of body and mind) are a part of that. You are not in control in any grand sense. Resistance to all of these negative states, behaviors, and reactions comes mostly from feeling like you are a real, continuous entity which can affect how that actually fabricated, spontaneously arising and passing entity plays itself out. I think it ultimately comes down to seeing what you actually are with deep, penetrating, and relatively “permanent” insight which stops or significantly reduces your ability to resist. The odd thing about stopping the resistance to the resistance you feel at a sort of meta level will usually calm you down in tangible and helpful ways which make your life more successful in a practical as well as spiritual sense. I was listening to a Taoist master on Guru Viking (pretty high quality YouTube channel in podcast format), and he said that Taoism isn’t about becoming a God. It’s more or less about being the only thing you actually can be which is the true-to-life authentic expression of yourself. You can’t ever go against that expression. You can appear to fight with yourself to change this or that behavior, but all of that is ultimately just more authentic expression that can’t help but be 100% spot on authentic in every moment possible. I guess my main “advice” for your questions is to relax into what and who you are. You can only imagine that you are resisting that flow. You can’t actually resist that flow of things. As things stand now, you (meaning the sensations of the body/mind in this context) are a pretty large portion of “what is”, and if you can’t allow yourself to do and be what your karmic (meaning cause and effect in a pretty non-mystical way) conditions set you to be, you will always feel to be in a more or less big mess of resistance. You are what and who you are, and you can’t do much but realize that that is ultimately just fine if you are allowed to express your nature which was handed to you in the way that nature is going to express itself whether you feel to be on board with it or not. These should both be very helpful if you find what I said to resonate.

It looks fine, but who wants to eat exactly that all of the time? I think a version of that which allows for variance in the diet as long as the other options are relatively healthy would work best. Practically speaking, a 100% clean and nutritionally-optimized diet for physical health is likely not the best for overall health when considering the effects being too strict can have on mental, emotional, and spiritual health.

Recorded this last night and thought some of you here might enjoy it.

@meta_male sure, just send a PM with any questions you might have

Resting for 15 seconds is completely sub optimal for muscle growth and strength development unless the movements are under such a light load that they require such a short rest window to be effective. 3 minutes rest at least on heavy compound movements is a good starting point but even 5 minutes of rest has more upside if you’re also interested in maximizing strength gains.

Go to ten psychics, and if one doesn’t tell you that you’re an old soul, you’ve hit a sort of mega-lottery level of improbability

The “right” answer is whatever form you find most enjoyable and are most likely to put lots of hours into. There are tons of forms and flavors of yoga. Jnana yoga, Bhakti yoga, karma yoga, raja yoga, hatha yoga, kundalini yoga, kriya yoga, etc. I remember I used to look down on hatha yoga from the perspective of thinking it wasn’t as conducive to the highest awakenings, which is true, but nowadays I really enjoy hatha yoga class once per week. It is a great way to “embody” some deep insights. My entire field of experience, energy levels, mood, presence, etc. are all opened up significantly after a good hatha yoga session. It also can help develop resilience to difficult sensations and be a healthy practice ground to evolve your capability to imbibe difficult sensations making you more capable of handling difficult situations in the future.

@meta_male glad you liked it and found it helpful ?

@nuwu well I can only say that some of what people call Nirvana/Nibbana is not just physical death but also the death of the universe and all of existence. It only entails physical death in the way someone might say they died while tripping although I will say it feels “more dead” than anything I’ve encountered on psychedelics. This is only one form and interpretation of Nirvana/Nibbana. The ultimate form of Nirvana/Nibbana in some interpretations does require physical death. It’s called parinibbana. There are a number of older interpretations of cessation where it was referred to as “extinction” which makes a lot of sense to me after having gone through it. It is in the moment of occurrence the “extinction” of EVERYTHING, at least for a brief yet seemingly infinite non-moment. It also makes sense to refer to it as extinction in the sense that the sense of self will never be the same and the old way of subtly reifying experience is no longer going to compute.

If medically defined psychosis counts as insanity, it can feel more liberating and positive than many enlightenment experiences. It really just depends on the individual and context of the insanity. But this comes from the perspective of someone who was mixing the two together. Psychosis without the non-psychotic spiritual development is definitely worse than psychosis with the normie spiritual development alongside it from my experience.

I think one thing that could make communication be more helpful on here is trying to be precise with how we use big buzz words and at times giving a quick working definition of what we mean. For example, there are countless times people say awakening, enlightenment, etc. and often two or more individuals end up in a bit of debate or light argument which might have been avoided if people were more clear with what they mean. I’ve even had times where I get in a bit of contentious discussion over something to end up seeing we were trying to say the same thing although the connotations we had individually made us both interpret each other in completely inaccurate ways until a few responses had gone back and forth.

@VeganAwake thanks man! That quote definitely runs along similar lines to what I tried to describe

She doesn’t like fingering? Sounds like it’s time to eat some p*ssy. She even said she’s mostly into clitoral stimulation.

I think the system lacks from the ability to give nuanced responses, but this is to be expected to some degree with any similar type of questionnaire. To at least two or three of the questions I sat there thinking “it’s kind of both” or “at what time of day/state/mood would I react this way vs. the other”.

The ironic thing about this thread is I think we can all agree that the Buddha had a better direct experience of reality (in imagination of course) than some normie with a nice house and kids or even a billionaire today. At least it’s incredibly obvious to me. To come to one of the classic peak states of Buddhism such as cessation (which for the most part all came from Hinduism too) is to see that nothing in the normal dream life on earth can compare to this. It’s quite strange we’re even having such a conversation on a place online where people should know better by now.

Salvia was ironically one of the most pleasant psychedelics I’ve ever tried. It’s interesting that you relate it to the no self insight specifically. Maybe it’s because I already had some permanent shifts related to the sense of self by that point, but to me it didn’t seem to do a whole lot other than provide a certain type of insight more along the lines of what experience is capable of rather than any of the traditional spiritual insights. It exposed me to some new forms of sensations for sure which were enjoyable.

@RMQualtrough it’s not that that is the only accurate translation, but it’s pretty clear from spending time with people very informed of these things (authors of books, people with multiple decades of practice, decades being monks, and even PhDs in the academic study of Buddhism) that “life is suffering” is not at all the full picture and actually gives so many people the absolute wrong idea of what Buddhism is. If Buddhism were to be phrased in one simple thing like that, it’d be way more accurate to say “there’s a legitimate and attainable path out of suffering. Here it is.” The first noble truth is not nihilistic. It’s just the practical truth that everyone knows living normal human life before a significant amount of spiritual progress.

“Life is suffering” is a pretty bad translation and oversimplification of the first noble truth. It’s more accurate to say “there is inherent suffering/dissatisfaction in life when one is not fully awakened”. I’d highly doubt that second sentence does not apply at least a little for you if you’re completely honest with yourself. That’s not at all to say 99% of life isn’t amazing for you. I mean that’s how it feels for me, but there are certainly situations which can produce suffering and dissatisfaction although I have techniques that can basically make it vanish whenever I want if I care enough.

@RMQualtrough good work. Keep it up. You’re still not fully awake though. You’ll know you’ve gone all the way once rectal prolapse has occurred.

@Carl-Richard lots of words, and still much of the content possible isn’t covered very directly. The main point is that minds are not empty of content, and to think they are is simply to not have looked at the subtleties which can be noticed to be operating. The mind sense door has WAY more to it than discursive thought and images. Anyway, we’re far from the original topic of the thread at this point.

I wouldn’t go far as to say totally empty. When I said that, I was also talking more along the lines of Mind rather than mind. The idea that you have a mind without conscious ideas and thoughts is possible, but there is still plenty going on mentally usually just at subtler levels.

I think you misinterpreted what I meant. When there is no content, there is no experience whatsoever. But of course, attachment to some idea of being God is simply a belief sometimes correlated with profound states and in other cases almost identical to stage blue dogma structurally.

There is no such thing as a mind without content… Truth can manifest in an infinite number of appearances, and it certainly isn’t the case that enlightenment only is accessible to standard human brain function. That is laughable to the highest degree. If enlightenment is related to the structure of and nature of what is actual, this isn’t going to be limited to a tiny range of appearances.

PM me if you want to know an in-depth answer. The short answer is that people who have abnormal neurology will naturally be thrown into radical states of consciousness. For most of these people, the radical states are unskillful and unhelpful. For a rare few, they can essentially be a psychedelic in your back pocket you might say. These neurological differences can certainly speed up the awakening process. Mania and depression as well as other common states that occur for the neurologically uncommon people map remarkably closely to the stages of insight in Theravada Buddhism and a bit less closely in plenty of other spiritual traditions I’ve come across. Also, being verifiably clinically insane while also having access to deep spiritual truth and realization will lead to more radical states than a neurotypical person having the same spiritual understanding 100% of the time. The issue is that a person in such a state will not only be misunderstood because the people around them are not awake, but they will also be misunderstood because their brains are naturally capable of producing states of consciousness even an awake yet neurotypical person is not going to be able to access. This all leads to a very easy misinterpretation.