The0Self

@LfcCharlie4 Just a suggestion, but not an advisement: if you seek anything sensory, seek the Jhanas. They are out of this world blissful. They make MDMA seem like nothing in comparison. Of course, in the end, who cares?

It absolutely can change, but it seems it usually does not. I used to score as INTP 8 years ago, but after doing a shockingly huge amount of psychedelics and meditation, I now score solidly as INFP. And by a shockingly huge amount of psychedelics, I'm not even willing to admit just how much -- when I trip, I go to war.

@Ananta Me too

@Preety_India not at all. Text doesn’t really take up much space compared to music, images, and videos.

Sadness is the epitome of beauty. Is it any wonder why we cry during peak experiences? True happiness has no opposite.

Andy Cutler Onibasu

Almost feel like these are “guilty pleasures.“ Lmk if you find them as euphoria-inducing as I do.

Maybe melancholy is a better word? I’m a very happy person. Always have been. I’ve never been depressed. I see sadness as the opposite of joy (which I also love), not the opposite of happiness.

Yep, that’s what it feels like after awakening. For me anyway. It felt like god was pushing air into my lungs every time I breathed in. I felt like a marionette, walking around weightlessly.

Never understood this thing about wanting to feel better when sad. I fucking live for sadness. Even before awakening, sadness was my favorite emotion. It’s just absolutely magical.

I’ve noticed this very prominently in probably 80% of the girlfriends I’ve dated regularly. Maybe even 99% but it was inconclusive in 20%. Most of them were in their early-mid 30s though. I’m mid 20s and have a major thing for women quite a bit older than me. This is not unique to you, it’s the human condition.

@arlin Being really materialistic here, but... I can’t really get a good look at you, but I would say, based on your profile pic, you could easily be a 6/10 on the attractiveness scale. Especially with a lot of meditation and lifting. For both sexes, when they’re very attractive, a partner that qualifies as a “would always bang“ = 7+/10. You’re literally just below that threshold (as is almost everyone). Not being in the “would always bang” category is not the end of the world mate.

You know, I saw this thread like a couple days ago or something, and thought, “wth, there are people on THIS forum that can’t even forgive everyone?.” I’ve come to my senses. Forgiveness is a very beginner practice, BUT if you think of gears on a bike, forgiveness is gear 1, and gear 1 has a fuck ton of leverage. A hell of an opportunity! These “bad“ people are perfection, as is everything. Not to mention, they’re what is. What about them can you not forgive? Try to find it. It isn’t there, because nothing is there. There’s just what seems to be happening.

Damn, all I use is the Notes app on my iPhone. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages (actually probably thousands) that I’ll probably never read. If it’s important, you’ll remember it... I do anyway.

I got a lecture containing nonduality in one of my history elective classes in college. It involved the Mayans. Professor was woke as fuck though — actualized as all hell. He even talked to the fucking class about his cocaine and LSD experiences. I participated in that class a lot and almost regret not continuing my relationship with him, considering how much he seemed to like me as well. Value your relationships, folks — even with your professors.

Suffer less, but only by noticing it more.

Yes, that's the point. Doesn't matter how that realization comes about. Cessation is not necessary, it's just one way -- and sometimes rather than providing the realization, cessation just becomes a nice toy that one can use to experience the bliss wave that comes after it.

The moments before and after the cessation event are insight experiences (awakenings). They don’t always lead to enlightenment. Yes it’s possible in normal meditation but it depends on what you mean by normal — if you mean standard breath/concentration practice, then no it’s very unlikely. It comes from either aggressive skilled noting or balancing very powerful concentration with very powerful mindfulness — penetrating experience such that it gets extremely wispy and then when it becomes so un-solid the mind can’t do anything with it, the lack of the mind “doing anything with it” results in “lights out,” revealing experience to be the mind’s own making. To clarify (noting works very well for this but I'll describe what can happen with breath meditation at a very high level of meditation skill) -- if you are skilled enough to enter jhanas, the jhanas can get your concentration to a level that's really impossible to imagine -- eventually you can actually attend to the sensations so closely that the time element isn't fully accounted for, and the breath becomes like an oscilloscope -- you're observing the entire breath cycle at once. Time is completely outside of experience. It's insanely trippy. If you try to further deconstruct this extremely subtle experience, you might not find anything and the mind gives up on sense-making, which is how experience is constructed, and so there may be a blip where you essentially just jump forward in time for a few frames of reality. But it's not always felt as jumping forward in time, sometimes it feels very strange loopy, sometimes it seems like a bit of reality was just eaten up by oblivion, etc.