Bazooka Jesus

PS: Yeah, it's a good one... especially considering that the guy who wrote it was one of the grumpiest mothereffers who ever walked this planet.

@Water by the River The story of how the story that you are telling yourself is not a story is my absolute favorite story. True story!

Golden words. 🕉

Read your own OP. You have already given yourself the answer.

If you truly understand this, you have already learned the lesson. The purpose of pain is to be painful. The purpose of challenges is to be challenging. If they weren't, they wouldn't exist. Do you expect pain and challenges to dissappear once you have grasped their divine value and purpose? That's like expecting your girlfriend to dissappear once you have learned to unconditionally appreciate and love her. Doesn't really make much sense, now does it?

All of the above, and none of it. Why cling to a label?

This. The thing is that it usually requires a lot of patience to get there... which most people don't seem to have, especially here on this forum. And ironically, the less patience you got, the more you would benefit from a regular meditation practice. It's not the naturally fit and muscular folks who ought to hit the gym. It's the ones who aren't.

Hey there fellow seeker, how is it going? Making any progress with this "awakening" stuff? What's that I hear you say? You have seen through the story of the separate self? Good. What other stories are you holding on to? Are you holding on to a story of God? Are you holding on to a story of creation? Are you holding on to a story of reality being a dream? Are you holding on to a story of "you" being all there is? Are you holding on to a story of how the stories that you are holding on to are not stories but truth itself? Keep going, until all stories are seen through and recognized for what they are. That's when you realize that which lies beyond all stories. ♾️

Everything changes. No-thing doesn't. Everything and Nothing are two sides of the same coin. Simple as that.

Yemeni forces are joining in on the fun... This doesn't look good.

See, this is the kind of twisted reasoning that conflating the relative with the absolute will lead you towards. A so-called awakening is a relative experience; if it were not relative, it could not be experienced. As such, it is an occurrence within time. What is time? It is a conceptual framework within duality (duality being that which makes experience possible); where there is experience, there is the perception of change, and where there is the perception of change, there is (the concept of) time. And you won't ever rationalize your way out of this.

This is great to see.

If everything is a fantasy, then nothing is. "Fantasy" is a relative concept that has meaning only in relation to "not fantasy". But we've been over this a thousand times by now, haven't we? Including Solipsism?

What does direct experience tell you? Don't put too much stock in what others tell you. There is nothing wrong with collecting information, but it should only serve as a catalyst for you to go deeper and deeper into pure unfiltered first hand experience. Once you stop taking anybody's word for anything, true clarity becomes possible.

Well, let's hope that this is going to be the final round. An esteemed member of this forum PM'd me today in order to inquire about my take on Solipsism, and I was so mightily pleased with my response that I thought it might be a good idea to share it with all you other buggers out there. You're welcome! --- Look, it's very simple: Reality is appearance. Whatever appears here and now is that which exists. And that's the whole story! Slapping the label 'me' onto the whole of existence/appearance is an unnecessary and nonsensical extra step, and it is based on a very clear and obvious fallacy... the fallacy of taking a random relative concept (me) and conflating it with the absolute. Instead of calling it 'me', you might as well call it 'cheeseburger', 'Santa Claus' or 'The Flying Spaghetti Monster'. Now, do others exist? Sure... as a concept, they exist. Does their perspective exist? Sure... as a concept, it exists. These concepts are undeniable appearances in the here and now and thus they are real; if they weren't, we could not talk about them right now, you see? But don't conflate random relative concepts with the entirety of reality in which these concepts appear... it is the mother of all spiritual traps, and it can lead to all kinds of dangerous delusions. Hope this helps!

Well, it looks like you have two options: Either keep on numbing the chronic symptoms with short-acting methods and substances or get proper therapy and uproot the cause of it. There is no real right or wrong here. Your life, your choice. Nobody can make this decision for you.

Bottom line: Don't believe anyone who tries to tell you that absolute reality has certain qualities. It doesn't. Bazooka out.

Who told you that? That's slander! Grrrroooaaaaaarrrrrrr!!! Kidding aside, I thought so too... and then I realized that 'I' is a concept. Imagine my surprise!

For me they go hand in hand. Once you start to realize what a fucking joke all of your mental labels and stories are, you can recognize reality for what it is.

Copycat.

It's your thinking about it which is complex. Why? Because absolute reality is so goddamn simple that you absolutely cannot wrap your mind around it; and so you concoct this absurdly complex mental construct that you keep ruminating on just to have something that you can hold on to. Absolute Reality = absolute Simplicity. Only relative things are complex.

Well, what are your goals? And why do you have them in the first place? Everything we do, we for for love. It's just that a lot of us are pursuing love in rather dysfunctional and ineffective ways because we deeply mistrust other people due to traumatic experiences that made us believe that the love that we get from other human beings will always be fickle, treacherous and impermanent, and so we try to get the love we seek from more "reliable" sources like money, professional success or drugs... or, in my case, from art and music. Why bother with people if you can just work on your business, play guitar or pop a pill instead, right? The problem is that none of these evasion tactics are a true substitute for meaningful relationships, so they will always leave you feeling kind of hollow and empty inside. So the only real solution is to dig up the root cause of your mistrust in others, heal you trauma and learn to trust again... which can take up a whole lifetime, but what else is there to do?

One of my favorite sayings of all time: Procrastination is like masturbation. It feels really good in the beginning, but in the end you realize that you've just fucked yourself.

He describes the three main stages of consciousness development pretty well. I would describe them like this: 1st stage: "I have consciousness" 2nd stage: "I am consciousness" 3rd stage: "There is nothing but consciousness (and 'I' am just an appearance inside of it)" I would add the caveat though that the third stage cannot accurately be put into words... so whatever description you come up with, it's not it. Not because it is too complex -- on the contrary: It is way too simple to put it into words. It is absolute Simplicity itself!

@Javfly33 Again: What have you tried? There is classic talk therapy, internal family systems therapy, gestalt therapy, primal therapy, neurofeedback, EMDR, hypnosis, energy healing... and the list goes on. You need to do research and find out which one is best suited for you. And of course, you also need to find the right therapist. Trying out one kind of therapy with one random guy and then deciding that all therapy is BS is like popping Ecstacy at your friend's birthday party and then deciding that all psychedelics are crap. Or going to your local church, listening to a sermón and then deciding that all spiritual pursuit is nonsense. If you want to get a proper understanding of trauma healing and therapeutic modules, I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748