Johnny5

It's kind of like the young lady/old hag picture, where you can interpret it both ways: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/53761789271897856/ Both interpretations are valid, but no interpretation is fundamentally true. Pain is an interpretation. Valid, but not true. Just whatever you make of it, nothing more and nothing less. And same with everything else. So it's not that it's an actual mystery in the sense that there is something about it that you can't know. Rather it is a mystery in the sense that there is nothing to know about it, and whatever you do know about it is ultimately not true.

I wouldn't feel any less about it if I were you. It can be and often is an ugly game at those levels. You could do anything you really wanted to, and if you do then by all means go for it. But you may not want to be like them. Speaking for myself, I never saw the appeal.

Things never change that fast, doomsday preppers least of all. But given enough time, who knows.

Subjectively speaking, the feeling of identification is the body. At least for now. But it's only "a self" if you buy into it being "a self". Like what if a sleazy used car salesman tried to sell you something that you just know is too good to be true. The car may even look like it's the best deal you could wish for, but nonetheless you just know there is something fishy about it, because that guy is way too eager to let you fall for his tricks. Convincing as it all may seem, you are not obliged to buy into it. See what I mean? So your experience doesn't need to change for you to start questioning why you buy into it, and what if you didn't... You don't need to remain a slave to how convincing it seems when you already know there's something fishy going on. Give it a try, without any expectations. ?

Go watch the french movie "Irreversible". https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/

Technically form is not fear. Fear, like evil, is only a mask, which you yourself are projecting out.

I wouldn't expect to reconcile it with the personal perspective. Things such as depicted in that scene will always be distasteful to a healthy individual. It's just, at the very least, that your perspective can get much larger than that, without excluding anything. This isn't even enlightenment stuff yet. You are already larger than any particular perspective, you can hold any number of them including mutually exclusive ones, as long as you don't believe any of them to be ultimately true. So the need to try and reconcile them simply doesn't come up. Absolute truth relativizes everything and denies nothing. You can't do this if you insist on adhering to any particular view. That's where the real work is done. The point is not to try and like distasteful things, nor to suggest that any particular view is wrong. The point is to gain a higher level view that encompasses them all. In one sense, none of them are true, and yet in another sense they all have a place and a right to exist.

Yes, that game. Your career is not your husband. If you have ambitions, it's not going to play by just waiting for everyone else to cater to them. P.S. in my first reply i thought you meant "moving up" on the spiral... so, for what it's worth.

I'd file this under "Society, Environment, Government, Politics".

If you want to play the game then that's how it works. Nobody is forcing you.

What is that, a chapstick for ants?

@ElenaO The point is simply that your spiral stage is a value system, and when you have strong emotional charge (positive or negative) about certain things then that indicates places in your value system where you are liable to get stuck, unless you confront them. It doesn't mean you need to "embody" every possible thing from every possible stage, you can still be you (by all means!). But it means when something clashes with your value system, it is worth investigating why that is and try on different perspectives. Even the trying on of different perspectives doesn't need to become a thing in itself. It's just a way of scrutinizing your attachment to your own perspective and thereby undermining a particular obstacle. So it's more like a corrective in order to get unstuck, not a mandate to fit yourself into other people's boxes. Another way to do that is to go the opposite route and become a devoted adherent of your perspective about something, until sooner or later the emotional charge behind it exhausts itself or becomes untenable. That's when it ceases to be an obstacle, and then it automatically becomes easy to see it in different ways. Either way the road is always subtractive. In the absence of obstacles, development is automatic.

I'm at sea level.

Tsk tsk... It's "you and me"... Sometimes it's "you and I", but not in this case. You can know the difference by making the shorthand explicit. For example: "You and I need to talk." ...is shorthand for: "You need to talk and I need to talk." -> clearly "me need to talk" wouldn't work here, so "you and I" is correct. Another example: "This land was made for you and me" ...is shorthand for: "This land was made for you, and this land was made for me." -> clearly "was made for I" wouldn't work here, so "you and me" is correct. Another way of getting there is to see whether the "I/me" is connected to a verb or to a preposition. If it's a verb like "I need" in the above example, then it should be "I", precisely because it's a verb. If it's a preposition like "for me" in the above example, then it should be "me", precisely because it's a preposition. "Between" is a preposition, so "between you and me" is correct. It just so happens that "you" serves both purposes, e.g. "you need" vs. "I need", and "for you" vs. "for me". So they look like the same "you" but they actually aren't, hence the confusion.

What else is there but semantics to be lost in...

If it's a big question, then it has a very clear and definite answer: It can't. But it's not a big question, it's a nonsense question based on unsound presuppositions. Which is hilarious, come to think of it... because that in itself already demonstrates that even the question can't come from nothing.

@Javfly33 Nothing wrong with fear. Just be careful not to turn 5-MeO into your gatekeeper, nor any measure of success. You'll get more mileage out of realizing how you create that barrier, than by pushing through it with a dose and still be clueless how it happened.

My mother died 13 years ago. Life has never been the same. It would be a bad thing if it were.

@gswva ?

Then find out what's in the way of it. It's always the energy of fear. Like fear of death for example. Fear of the unknown. Or rather ones projections about it. That's why don't deny your own mortality. Better to dive headlong into it. Practice death awareness. No matter how you spin it, your life as you know it WILL end. Your only chance is to make peace with it. THAT is surrender.

You don't have to be. Even God likes company.

If that's what it is, then so be it...?

Not sure I follow.... I think you got the wrong idea about the impersonal life. In fact any idea about it is guaranteed to be wrong.