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.

Watched this one for the first time the other day, I'm now motivated to fall in love with my life. Video topics could be practical or more philosophical but I'm leaning more towards practical at the moment.

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.

I love that this has become such a big deal on this site lol. Definitely seems like believers are the minority here, which is a little surprising to me to be honest. I personally don't believe much in intentional manifestation, but maybe unintentional manifestation sometimes happens.

Makes sense , but bizarre coincidences still happen , and that to me helps to explain the staying power of this manifestation stuff (it's had a few different words over the years).

In terms of insight I think I agree with you but most people just want to end their suffering . I want both.

It's cool to know this stuff but I feel like awakening is a more realistic goal, permanent enlightenment seems like something that only happens if you're exceptionally lucky so I'm not sure it's worth obsessing over.

While that's true . I also think killing him off in Ep1 was mad stupid lol. Well, maybe not stupid in the moment, but stupid in hindsight .

I don't even know what awake means anymore. And I don't really care to know . Reality IS, God IS, and yet, the human part of me also IS.

Dr K here says more or less what I already noticed. That a) trying to make things happen by magic doesn't work , b) sometimes weird things happen , but c) I can't predict when how or why weird things happen . I think if u raise your consciousness the likelihood of things working out goes up , you could view that from a practical or a mystical viewpoint. For one, if ur consciousness is higher you have fewer desires so u need less to be happy , also your brain works better , and you're less needy.

Some studies have shown statistical effects on random number generators over hundreds of thousands of trials but no dramatic siddhis have ever been verified. I do think raising your consciousness and generally having good vibes leads to more oppurtunities, but i wouldn't count on it reliably causing things to manifest out of thin air.