Oppositionless

@Hyperion yeah I try to do 2 a year haha I wish! Meditation doesn't come naturally to me at all . I have to fight and work my ass off just to sit for 20 minutes lol. It gets easier on a retreat but still a pain.

Zen retreat (sesshin). I don't go to those 10 day vipassana retreats because they're too long (at least for this part of my path). A sesshin is usually 4 or 5 days.

yeah more or less. Never been sick that long before.

Ive been sick for almost three weeks now. Thankfully the acute fever only lasted two weeks . But damn, this sucks. Totally has made me recontexualize health.

After this last retreat I went on, I think idealism might just be the final stepping stone before you can finally embrace direct realism. The realization I had is that phenomena simply exist . I already knew they didn't come from a brain; but I was still attached to the idea they come from consciousness. Even writing this I'm doubting it, but the realization on retreat was obvious : phenomena exist, nothing creates them, not even consciousness. Ironically direct realism is the unconscious view we all had as babies, so when you deconstruct your conditioning, you come back to the natural viewpoint . This is a very recent development for me but I wanted to share bc it's profound. When I think about it it doesn't make sense , I'm not sure the intellect can understand it. The intellect assumes cause and effect , that everything has a source .

I've started to realize that all psychedelics, no matter how good the trip is, lead to emotional instability for me in the following days and weeks.

A thought I had last night . People will shit on mainstream music while taking mainstream science at face value .

sometimes when you're at a point of absolute desperation and misery, on the verge of giving up, something will come up, it might feel like a sign, to get you to keep going. that to me is the essence of manifestation. Most of the really big "manifestations" I've had , have been when I was at rock bottom . Lol.

Two days ago I made fun of my friend for being a valley girl, a day later ended up on a date with a literal valley girl.

It's pretty easy to breakthrough with a cartridge on 5 meo (unlike NN).

Im not sure if this was a cessation, but when I first started doing kriya yoga (results got dramatically less pronounced shortly after), I had a kundalini awakening, followed by three experiences where the feeling of having a center or focal point of awareness disappeared momentarily, it was pretty dramatic and felt like physical death. I've never experienced anything quite like that before or sense, including on psychedelics.

Mahayana Buddhism sees awareness / Buddha nature as fundamental, they distinguish it from conditioned consciousness. the back and forth between Buddhism and Hinduism is really interesting. Buddha wanted to distance himself from Hinduism so he rejected a lot of Vedic stuff, and then a lot of the later Mahayana Buddhists were like wait we fucked up and went back and added some Vedic stuff back, but had to do it with Buddhist sounding words. And finally Advaita Vedanta showed up and was like a marriage between the older Vedic culture and the later Mahayana Buddhism .

Cthulu Venom (from Spiderman) but sexy female

Thing about psychedelic states is you can't make them your baseline . Enlightenment can be your baseline though. I'm gonna keep tripping cause I want more of those insane experiences, but I also want to be enlightened on a day to day basis, that's why I meditate my ass off regardless of my trips.

I think that, regardless of anything else, visualizing yourself as being successful at whatever field you want to succeed at, works. Since visualizing myself confidently flirting with women I've gone on two dates, after a pretty long dry spell.