Eph75

What kind of behavior are you after? Upbringing is cumulative and starts out on a trivial level, e.g. such things as them saying things like "you are stupid", "he/her/mommy/daddy is stupid". Children will test you to see what goes and what does not in orde to figure out where the boundaries are. Obviously you don't succeed by regressing to getting angy at the child, yelling at him/her and saying "no you are the stupid one" or something demeaning like that. You'd sit down with the kid and explain hos that makes others feel and tune him/her into understanding what it would be like if he/her was the other person. Empathy is base to much and is cultivated, value systems are cultivated and behaviors are cumulative. Although, people in general tend to do that. They tend to get angry. Or tend to laugh it away. And with that a different cumulative direction starts growing. Or just ignoring them. (For the record, I have two childen, boys, whom are 17 and 19 years old now) Take any given child that has been cultivated e.g. into a strong red for 7-8-9 years, dropped in your care is of course a whole different challenge than raising toddlers.

Are we comparing small children with predators lurking in the dark waiting for a chance to devour you in one piece? Some children sure can seem that way when you watch them interacting with their low consciousness parents, but I ensure that they are not and that they are just responding to the dynamics of the relationship. You can talk to children, also very small children and constructive interaction is not only possible but quite easy. Small childen are also very formative and will resond well to such interaction. "Going red" would not involve constructive formative work. "Going red" just enforces red behavior in the child. That's what happens in lower stage societies and why development of a society takes hundreds of years. There's simply little to no higher cognitive influence in those formative years. In a spiral wizard manner you can meet red by interacting with red in a way that red resonds well to, that is understood. That is not the same as dropping to the same level.

This sounds like the deceptive words - and lies - of the ego, trying to justify doing what you do in order to not have to deal with it being a defense mechanism for something else. While it doesn't have to be that, it's very common and is usually related to a low self-esteem and self-worth. By looking for others approval and acceptance, and getting that gives you a false feeling of increased self-worth. This happens when you please others, people like to be pleased and they typically like people that please them as they feed their egos in different ways. Ultimately we're looking for other peoples interest in us, their approval and acceptance. That way we feel as we can belong which fills a hole in us. Have you explored this possibility? Of course this doesn't mean that you can't do things for others without ulterior motives.

Anger is an emotion that is calling upon for you to take action. It should not be labelled as "good" or "bad". Nor should you ignore or push it away. Listen to it - it's trying to tell you something important. Being attentive to anger and taking action based on it - we'll get back to "no action" - is not that same as taking action fueled by aggression. Just like shame is an emotion that is helping you to create and maintain your outward boundaries, anger is there for you to help create and maintain your inward boundaries and to keep others from overstepping those boundaries and infringe on our "personal space". All of this of course can have healthy and unhealthy manifestations. If someone slaps you in the face, bully you or is plain rude, such boundaries needs to be maintained, that is healthy. It's a matter of maintaining your self-worth. What a healthy response is, is relative to the magnitude of the "offence", but usually the best responses are the ones that don't act out anger (through aggression) but non-aggressive responses called upon by becoming aware of having felt angry/triggered. Those, even though initiated from an anger emotion, are creative and shape your well being. Just because the anger train arrives at your train station, don't get on that train. Choose another train. Punching someone right back in their face is not very constructive, but if they're trying to hurt you physically or even risk your life and you are defending yourself, punching might be called for. But it's probably never creating anything good except for that instance of personal protection - and of course, setting a boundary that a particular person may or may not challenge again. The actual outcome is not predictable as human interactions are complex. If someone says something that offends you due to you having different opinions and you respond with anger, that is unhealthy and should be further explored and reflected upon. Acting out anger through aggression based on your beliefs being challenged isn't a great thing. Take that anger and transform it into constructive and exploring dialogue instead. "No action" or "no response" is not to be neglected. It's perfectly fine to "not respond", and is often a great immediate response, as long as you are not pushing anger away and boxing it up inside you, as that's an accident waiting to happen. Take "no action" and later, once the anger in you have subsided ... turn to introspection. It all depends on how you relate to your anger and how you relate to the things that make you angry. The best thing to do is to become more aware of your anger and your triggers and explore those. That can help you to detach from the emotional attachments that causes you to feel anger in the first place and result in feeling anger less frequently and with less magnitude and will get you into a place of greater equanimity. Getting to such a place opens up many doors in terms of learning, acceptance, love and so on. A lot of anger is based on lack of understanding or plain misunderstanding. Still, getting angry and showing aggression isn't the end of the world, be gentle with yourselves while still being attentive to the opportunity to learn more from such happenings.

@Lila Yes, it's not a "race", it was just a figure of speech, a "marathon" analogy - being a "long race" and not a "short sprint" Replace it with "continuing the work indefinitely".

From a developmental growth perspective there is not really any going back, but in development you do have stretches into territory that is beyond your center of gravity and you can spend time there, but just like you say, when shit hits the fan and circumstances give you a good slap in the face you get pulled back to the level in which your gravity of sense-making lies. As @WhatAWondefulWorld says, it's about resilience, not giving up and accepting that these kind of things take time. You will also have to become friends with "plateauing out" from time to time, and just as you've experienced, something that look like regression - which is a return from more or less temporary modes of "stretched performance". Finding ourselves on a "plateau" can be demoralizing especially as development when in flow sometimes can seem like being caught by an avalanche and you sort of is along for the ride without making much if any effort. Then a plateau hits and you wonder what happened, if that was it and you might end up giving up. Not good. Befriend the quirks of development, we're in a marathon and the only thing that matters is to not drop out of the race.

You can't "run away" from you shadow. You can run and it may feel good in that moment as you are being distracted with the going-ons, but sooner or later you catch a glimpse of that shadow, and it is as real as it was before you started running. That is why. You can have flow at times, pushing forward. But you have to stop at times, to face your past and shed those tears. Process what is found within that shadow so that it eventually can leave and you can go on with a "less dense and dark" shadow. Once you get rid of (accept or let go) the most emotionally challenging parts of your shadow, it will be much easier to continue working on the remainder. It will be more delightful than it will be emotionally challenging/upsetting. Leaning more towards previously unknown aspects than know pains.

Absolutely

"Smart" isn't about IQ alone, it's more about what kind of outcomes (decisions, understanding of the world, responses and actions) you are able to produce for yourself, which involves all of the intelligences - and more - not just IQ, and how these combined works with your cognitive development so that you have a high ability to sense, make sense and produce such sensible responses - presenting yourself in a "smart" way. Someone with moderate IQ can make "perfect sense" and create high quality outcomes while someone with [percieved] high IQ could be a psychopathic mess yet turning up as something that would be percieved as "smart" such as having high ranking positions in companies, success, money and so. We react more against people trying to be "smart" than noticing people who are smart and just acts on their capabilities but make little noise in the process. E.g. someone with high ability to convey information in such a way that the reciever percieves that information as a result of their own sense making, making them feel smarter - versus - the "smart" besserwisser that hands over the correct answers and making others feel dumber or inferior in that process. At the end of the day, who cares about being smart when what matters is how you show up and present yourself to the world. Release any attachment to needing to be smart and comparing yourself against people that you deem smart as correlation between IQ and showing unhealty behaviors. Those feelings are probably produced by your judgement towards others and the cognitive dissonance created by your desire to be smart and your fear of being smart based on that misjudgement of others "smartness".

Spirituality's equivalence effect-wise to that of Facebook/Instagram likes - a form of instant gratification? We tend to want to take the quick route and cut corners whenever we can so that we get what we want "now" and in the process the long route starts looking less and less attractive. I'm not labeling those choices in any way, just looking at it from a phenomena perspective it could and probably explains at least a part of that obsession linking in to the production of dopamine and serotonin production from whatever positive effects you get from that usage, and the craving to have more, fast. Even if it would be argued that you don't get addicted to psychedelics there's a second order effect on e.g. self-esteem that is highly addictive. E.g. you "become someone important/of interest" in conversations like these and so on, ego related/oriented effects that are easily overlooked.

You could always start paying attention to how these "low consciousness activities" affect you, general mood, motivation, how it activates your self-talk, what that self-talk is telling yourself, what kind of thoughts it gets hung up and so on. Not least, how all of the above affects your ability to focus and how your meditation (assuming that you meditate) is affected. Then stop for a while and notice what the difference is. After that you know for sure what the first hand experience of the activities are and what kind of implications they have on your being. Getting that first hand experience makes it easier to find motivation to change your lifestyle, but still, by no means, is it easy to do so. My own experience is that what I would call "low consciousness activities" are very toxic, but it's not a black/white, do/don't subject, it's related to amount/time. It's also very interrelated to how your mind is functioning, how you relate to guilt, shame, pressure, emotions and so on, as what you call "low consciousness activities" you've already categorized as "bad" and falling to the temptation of those will trigger such feelings of guilt, shame and so on, and it's not very hard to see how detrimental these feelings are when not understood and handled in a masterful way. How would, for example, these kind of activities affect you if your relation to them completely changed, e.g. if you managed to redefine them from being "bad" to being "good" or maybe more realistically "neutral". Is it in the first-order experience of these "low consciousness activities" that the toxicity lies? Or is it in second- or third-order effects there the problem lies? What is the problem, really? Is it possible that you would remain unaffected if you related to them in a different way? And if so, is it the activities that are "toxic" or is it something in your the way you related that is the "true toxicity"? Calls for some exploring

@Thewritersunion Absolutely, the known states and tiers are only limited by the currently - and always - limited human mind.

So, the thing is that you can't read or conceptualize yourself into developmental growth, this has to happen by integration - i.e. by walking the talk and living the changes by challenging your limitations. Through conceptualization you can create a facade through which you act, that is as long as you understand and recognize scenarios you have patterns to which you have a "stage behavior" that you "should" live up to. That's just being an actor on stage, being a jester to the audience so to speak. You have to develop into the stages, integrating them. You can definitively get pulled into a stage, e.g. being born in the western world where the center of gravity is at a particular stage, but since you get pulled into that stage so quickly, it's not going to be fully integrated. Pushing forward without first addressing shadows which are negative sides of or lack of integration of previous stages will create some cognitive dissonance as you will end up thinking that you are "higher stage" material but at the same time you are unknowingly suffering from "lower stage limitation". Really, the best thing that you can do is to read up on the model and get the best understanding that you can of what each stage, bottom up, where you have limitations that prevent you from developing and/or integrating previous stage. One of the fundamental problems with this - theoretically and from personal experience - is that you are not able to see nor understand the spiral before you have reached second tier. Pre-2nd-tier it will still be hugely beneficial when focusing and working on the limitations of the stages from a personal POV - integration. The whole awakening experience with stepping outside of yourself and experiencing watching yourself from somewhat of a third or fourth person perspective is hugely helpful here as you have to have a significant developmental shift in order to step outside of the limitations of pre-2nd-tier stages and "watch" yourself from a detached and distanced place in order to notice those limitations in yourself and also to be able to address them. The feeling to want to "skip stages" is in fact something that is related to the very limitations of pre-tier-2 stage.

I'd say no. Stages are not the same as states. Any stage can have awakening/enlightenment, that has nothing to do with stages. A permanent awakening is still not a stage leap. Stages have to be climbed and can't be skipped. Rushing through stages is possible, but it's likely to create shadow issues.

@noip What emotions are triggered inside you, here, right now, from this thread, and why? Remember, people don't make you angry, it's you who make yourself angry. Pointing towards something external is only to look for blame and justification which works as avoiding personal responsibility - and - prevents you from finding out the real reason, which is inside you.

Stop for a moment and really look at what is happening here.. Maybe there is a trigger here that is calling attention to itself? The hard part about personal growth is to lower our defenses and allow ourselves to explore what hasn't been before, that which has been accepted as truth or that which has been dismissed as not matching such beliefs that poses those truths. @noip There is something in your post about ghosting and "used to think.. no responsibility" that tells us that you do know that you have been doing this. I would explore that further and see where that leads, how that correlates with your experience that you posted about here - and - try stepping outside of yourself to allow yourself to better observe what emotions and defenses get triggered in that process. In the end, it's not about pointing fingers towards something about him nor pointing fingers towards something within you that leads to rejecting exploration of yourself. It's all about growing understanding of a situation (could be any situation) and how we relate to that situation, regardless where it takes us. Doing so with as much curiosity as we can muster. I would start with questions like; "what kind of expectations have I created for him?", "is there a chance that I have painted a picture that has been misleading to him" and so on. Also revisiting this: You acknowledge that you "used to ghost on people". Is there a chance that you did that this time as well, in a more subtle form? And maybe knowingly so? And maybe most provocative of all, what kind of feelings has ghosting been triggering within you? Is there a chance that it is somehow related to a feeling of pleasure? There question don't necessarily need to be answered here, it's more about contemplating questions than needing to answer them. Those kind of questions are very useful for exploration. To be able to stay with such provocative inquiries without getting triggered (much, because trigger it will). In such a moment, to refrain from feeling accused, victimized or lashing back at someone (or self) is truly a magnificent super-power Remember, you're looking for help to lead you to greater understanding, we're here to help That might mean others asking questions that you may need to think about and not that's not necessarily what you want to hear. And by no means does such questions, posted by some random person, imply they/us knowing anything; the situation, something about him, or you. We know nothing but our own interpretation of limited information that arises out of our own biases. @Preety_India It takes two to let go. The final word is not important, but notice how it makes us feel if the final word is ours, when if it's something not relevant as "I'm not going to waste anymore time debating", "Now let go" or "Can you drop it and can we move on?" Seeing when other are caught in a loop is useful. Speaking of super-powers, seeing when we ourselves should let go is nothing but that

Just finished watching a documentary I found interesting about overcoming drug addiction through psychedelics. Might be of interesting for you guys. "Dosed" http://imdb.com/title/tt9787524/

You should never worship anyone. Speaking of careful. Be careful to make definitive statements. It assumes knowing and the one thing we can know is that we can never really know anything. I have no opinions about Sadhguru btw.

At the end of the day, we're never ever going to know anything from conceptualizing and speculating. Only from confrontation and asking the right questions in the right way leads to true (or less inaccurate) understanding. Unless we are willing to attack that "beast", trying to figure out the whys and the hows make little sense, other that being distractions that are going to end up strengthening our own egos, as the answers are likely to end up being beneficial to self. So, the way forward is either practicing attacking "beasts" - or - practice letting go. Regardless outcome it amounts to growth. Shit don't make sense, so trying to make sense of shit on your own still amounts to... shit.

@kindayellow No, being alone with your thoughts should not be equivalent to setting yourself on fire, tearing your world apart. The inability to be alone with our thoughts in a healthy manner is what sets our world on fire. Distraction is the defense mechanism that prevents us, in our unhealthy state of being, from setting ourselves "on fire". What if being alone and in equinimity with thoughts is the way to go? And how do you get there? What ideas are there that needs to be let go of that is acting as fuel to your ruminations?

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Distraction is the easy way out - and avoidance of growth. Face your demons.

This is amazingly easy and it's amazingly amusing to see how people struggle with this, something that is trivial in the context of actualization. Go to bed same time every night, get up at the same time every morning, never sleep in, patterns shall arise and you shall awaken before the alarm rings. If you want to make it easier, when the alarm rings, put on previously prepared clothes and go for a nice walk. No hesitance, just do it. If you don't have time, set the alarm earlier to create the time. A few paces and you're completely awake. Choose not to be a victim of circumstances.

@Jed Vassallo Very cool stuff!

@LordFall Yes. Furthermore, there is a significant level of amusement in all of this, the trick is it see through and beyond the packaging and not allow it to lead you astray; the content of the review, the content in this thread, the content of the minds at play, the content of your mind. It's all a big joke. Existence that is, so why not surrender and join in with the laughter? But also this thread is what can be expected from the typical [replace with description of self].

Not knowing the depth of the toxicity in this, but from what I've read in the different threads you have started about your past relationship, it sounds like a volatile situation. Whatever happens, make sure you stay safe.