BipolarGrowth

There is no such thing as spirituality without “altered” states. To be even more clear, there is no human existence without “altered” states. There is nothing virtuous or desirable about the “lower” normal states of consciousness humans tend to inhabit when living in an unexamined way. The whole path of spirituality is a hunt to find what the real “unaltered” state actually is. This is essentially a fusion between the childlike freedom, wonder, and flow that we all experienced to some degree or another with the conditioned, egoic, and responsibility-focused adult life we are all naturally pulled to at some point. Eventually one finds through the path that experience has always been and always will be somehow the same process on a structural level, but the viewing of what the structure of experience is becomes more and more refined through the repeated exposure to a wide array of apparently different experiential configurations.

Your life already reflects the intelligence of God.

People often put in solitary confinement are about as low conscious as they come, and they likely have no knowledge of the practices which might awaken someone. It’s not much of a surprise that these people aren’t known for awakening.

It’s a bit odd you say you’ve put concentration & mindfulness on hold. They will likely only help you achieve your desire to realize God faster and potentially in a deeper way.

Try out many techniques and stick with the ones you enjoy most and that are giving you results. The most important thing is the consistency of practice. The amount of hours put into meditation determine most of how the results will go regardless of which technique is used. This is why picking an enjoyable technique is so important — you’ll be more willing to put tons of hours into something enjoyable.

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I know you ask to be detailed, but my answer is pretty simple. Spend it with her enjoying as many moments as you can. Do the hobbies or activities you both like to do. Focus the time around things that raise both her emotional state and yours to a “higher frequency”. This is all to say — make the time spent together an overall positive experience to the best of your ability. I’m sorry that you’re having to see her go, but realize that your maturity to see the value in spending time with her now is a great thing. I wish you the best during this trying time. With Love, Brandon ?

I think the OP has run into some misconceptions of Buddhism by paying too much attention to low-quality modern “Buddhists”. He even says “Suffering is a distraction from Truth.” Which certainly resonates with my perspective. If that statement is true, wouldn’t eradicating your personal suffering make it easier to pursue Truth, since then there would no longer be that large distraction? ? If any of you reading this are honest with yourselves, you can admit that you still likely have some degree of suffering, and the states brought about by this suffering are usually not as “high-conscious” as states without suffering tend to be. The truth is that trying to pursue Truth while in low-conscious states of mind, brought about by personal storylines and unhelpful ways of viewing pain and “negative” circumstances (exactly what Buddhism tries to solve), is bound to be sub-par or simply fail altogether.

Well this video I made at the time describes that state as well as deeper ones in what you’ll see is a pretty authentic way How I Experienced Back-to-Back Cessations Through Bhakti & Love (instead of meditating)

Psychedelics can definitely be worked with vipassana, and this can actually improve sila for some people ironically. If you want to know “how” to do it, it’s pretty simple. You just do vipassana and the other techniques or do vipassana at the same time as another technique or on psychedelics. A lighter dose of psychedelics is recommended though. I would say think of the psychedelic as a bit of lubrication for your awareness to respond to the vipassana technique. I’d only use a lighter dose as otherwise it’ll probably just be a trip rather than effective vipassana.

Conceptual teachings are trash unless they are used as boats to get to the other side of the river where the actual perceptual shifts occur. So many people get fooled into thinking they know what they’re talking about because they have conceptual understanding and a few to a few dozen peak experiences related to them. I used to be one of those people. It takes hundreds of peak experiences and ultimately a radical change in one’s baseline range of consciousness to know much about any of this nonduality stuff. @Leo Gura well said. Edit: this response to Leo was referring to the post immediately above mine. The idea that Leo teaches how to get out of group think but Buddhism doesn’t also show that is pretty damn hilarious. Go check out the Diamond Sutra. It’s literally called “the diamond that cuts through illusion.” Understanding what’s talked about in that text will cut through the illusion of the concrete existence of yourself, the Buddha and other beings. Leo will talk bad about Buddhism until he actually gets highly proficient at it and sees the power of those practices, if that ever happens. A Buddhist is not the person you go to to see how well 5-MeO works, and Leo is not the person you go to to see how well Buddhism works.

To put my experience with the eighth jhana in a nutshell: it maxes out the capabilities of consciousness in a freeze-frame sort of way that makes kind of no sense at all to describe and cannot be recalled accurately. All you can really say is “there was sort of something” but there definitely was no room for an individual self, human body, human mind, etc. I just shared his descriptions as he has far more experience with that specific state which is one of the best examples behind the point I was trying to make when I said what you asked about in the earlier post. I’m by no means a master of the state known as the eight jhana which is exactly why I quoted someone else. I’m not claiming to be a master of shamatha practices. I’m intermediate to advanced depending on which sample of people you’re choosing from a when it comes to that. I’m far more developed on the insight/vipassana axis of development however.

@Razard86 I’m going to just quote a description of one of such less fabricated potential experiences than consciousness from an expert as I’ve likely only truly “been there” one time as far as this specific state goes. The standard jhanas are often seen as being progressively less fabricated states until you go past the eighth jhana to the cessation of perception and feeling which is essentially the opposite of experience. “The Eighth Jhana, Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception If meditators wish to attain the eighth jhana, they can simply hang out in Nothingness until they get bored with perception entirely and understand that even the profoundly subtle perception that is Nothingness is subtly disconcerting or dissatisfying. Thus, the mind will eventually shift on its own to the state with the perplexing but thoroughly appropriate title of “Neither Perception Nor Non-Perception”, hereafter “the eighth jhana” or “j8” for the sake of brevity. This state is largely incomprehensible. There is no reasonable way to attempt to describe it, save that it is a mind state. I am tempted to say that in it we are simultaneously focused so narrowly that we notice nothing and yet so broadly focused that we don’t notice even that, but such a description doesn’t do this state justice. Another way I sometimes think of this state is like what happens when you turn off an old, tube-driven black-and-white television when the screen goes blank and just before it shuts off there is this tiny pale dot in the middle of the screen. It is like what happens just at the moment that dot is right on the edge of being totally gone, as if you froze in time that edge right between the dot being there and not being there and had it apply to everything in your whole sensate world. One way or another, there is complete inattention to diversity, or divestment from attention to multiplicity, however you wish to think of it. The eighth jhana is the highest of the standard ordinary states of concentration that can be attained (ignoring the attainment of nirodha samapatti, also known as “the cessation of perception and feeling”, and some more unusual jhanic goodies detailed later). This state is contrasted with the first seven jhanas in that it is not possible to investigate this state, because it is too incomprehensible.” Consciousness is basically the same as awareness in my vocabulary if that tells you anything. Consciousness and awareness are essentially the same as experience other than a handful of rare states which are still experiential but happening at more subtle levels than consciousness or awareness. If you want to read more description about the eight jhana, this is the source that was quoted: https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iii-the-samatha-jhanas/28-the-formless-realms/

@Inliytened1 well usually when I say “Just This” people don’t get much out of it hence the conceptual explanation. I’m pointing back to experience just as it is after dissolving the illusion of continuity of a self. As someone pointed out, what I’m saying is anti-concept. It’s the natural way experience works.

Very good. The dancing, fluxing, and infinite field of sensations has no ground whatsoever and is actually nonexistent in a certain sense while simultaneously being extant in another sense. Witnessing/becoming radical degrees of impermanence on the level of “bare” perception show this to be true. Try it out. Find the smallest constituents of experience you can find and see how quickly one goes to the other. It will eventually be seen that the entire field of millions or more sensory particles are originating in an interdependent dance which creates the illusion of there being a stable present moment which in fact never takes place nor does not take place.

Enjoy your avijjā ? Any teaching of Self taken to its conclusion will reveal anattā. Intellectual understanding of anattā is not the same as perceptual recognization of anattā in the entire sensory field. Perceptual recognization of anattā in the entire sensory field is not the same as the irreversible birth into seeing things as they are that occurs when anattā is no longer a glimpse but a living 24/7/365.25 reality. Anattā can more precisely be defined as non-substantiality of self rather than simply no self. This is to say that there is no essence. There is no immutable quality that has any continuity that could be pointed to as Self. The later formless jhānas reveal this quite clearly. Even consciousness is dependent upon the arising of other more subtle constituents of experience.

If it seems to help or make you more comfortable, that’s pretty much all that matters. Hum and whistle away

I just did my first kickboxing class last week. It was really fun and empowering. Definitely worth developing those type of abilities. There is an authentic and paradoxically feminine aspect of holding and allowing one’s masculine essence of aggression to be expressed that felt quite healing and energizing for me.

I used to look at reading as something I was actively doing to improve myself. While that has not entirely changed in that the activity is still improving me, my life is now so filled with harder and more involved activities years later that what used to be the “work” of my self-actualization journey has now become what I naturally want to do to “take it easy” or relax. I hope that this concept of progressing to make your hard work become your rest activity helps one of you out there.

The fact that you talk about being God and what the Buddha said is pretty odd. If anything, the Buddha’s teaching was something closer to: you are not God. The Buddha viewed the attachment to identity as one of the main problems with actually reaching Liberation in the path described in the four noble truths. Identification with self as God is a lack of depth in Buddhism. All experience and sensations within experience are too impermanent, selfless, and empty for it to make any sense to claim that one is God.

Enough time to get the desired result is the answer I’d say. This might be 10 hours for one person and 15 minutes for another. I’d say 1-2 hours for 10 years straight would get most talented people pretty remarkable results.

Precisely

Dissecting Leo Gura’s Take on Solipsism (Direct Communication to Followers of Actualized.org) In this video I go in depth on the type of solipsism that has been promoted by Leo in the past as well as linking it to other common concepts in other spiritual traditions such as the Atman, Brahman, and the radical levels of impermanence privy to higher-level Buddhist insight meditators. I’m not going to spell it all out here as doing this properly in text format would likely take more time than making the video did. I’ll leave the work of simply watching the video to you. If you’re impatient or in a rush, you can skip the first 5-10 minutes of introduction. A quick side note: I’ve not been taking my YouTube content and any spiritual topics released very seriously lately. This video is a strong exception to that. This is the first time in many months that I’ve released a deep “teaching”. This is by far the most complete and likely best-delivered video on spiritual topics I’ve made potentially in all my time on YouTube. I live my life in a rather effortless flow which is in many ways uncontrollable these days after my awakening process has deepened exponentially over and over ever since I reached stream entry (1st of 4 levels of awakening in the Theravadin Buddhist tradition) on May 28, 2021. What this has meant is that much of my content and life was essentially making and living itself to differing degrees with the past several months being on a completely immersive and involved autopilot that is quite difficult, if not impossible, to explain in its fullness. This is all to say that things finally lined up in this process of flow to create a deep and direct teaching on a serious note. I make this video because I have a good friend who has been suicidal multiple times due to misunderstandings of Leo’s teaching on solipsism. I do not hold Leo to blame for this, but this does lead me to want to naturally release a serious and in-depth piece of content on the matter. The video is a breakdown of solipsism only and does not get into any of these reasons for making the video nor does it spend any time with criticisms of Leo or similar things. I want to personally thank Leo for his work and the great help he’s given me indirectly through his teachings. I wish you all the best on your personal journeys.

❤️?? I was definitely in a tangential type of expression, but this is simply the only way that communication could have been done authentically at the time

@Jalextheopenminded maybe it’s time to try painting? ?