snowyowl

I get this idea, and practice in the form of acceptance /letting be. But, a question arises, that "I" am not the instigator of all the drama. Resistance arises by itself (along with everything else), so shouldn't I be accepting the resistance energy too rather than picking and choosing what to surrender to? If I give space to everything which appears in my mind, I find it a smoother route to tranquillity.

@Shunyata hi, no I've not listened to any, is that what Shunyamurti calls it? It's just related to my username, I like owls

My issue with this is, calling it "now" or the "present moment", "here and now" etc implies it exists as a moment in the succession of time, alongside other slices of time. I think the Abhidhamma in Theravada Buddhism goes into this - eg how long is a "moment". Not a criticism as such, but a reminder to check thoughts like this - "now" in this sense means everything not just a snapshot.

@Cosmin_Visan beware of presuming other people's motives without knowing their mind. If people are expressing their authentic level of understanding that's perfect and what the forum is for.

Which spiritual people say that? IMO language is an abstraction, a map, a very useful one at that. The delusion part is when you mistake the map for the territory, the abstraction for the actuality. There's no superior/inferior when we compare humans vs animals, we are all evolved to be good at 'doing our thing'. An eagle can't think like us but it can fly by itself and has got better eyesight than me Edit - Really there's no distinction anyway, humans are a type of animal, otherwise we start to think we're separate from nature.

Remember in school when the teacher explained something, or you read it in a book, then you had to explain it in your own words. Yes there is a bit of group speak here - as anywhere else - but I reckon most folks here are aware of the need to get there ourselves, that's the whole point.

Welcome to the forum Connor, good to see you here! You know how to make an entrance - but now the real work can continue

Yes I'd agree. There's lots of names for "it", none of which capture "it" precisely, so tolerance and open mindedness is key.

"Consciousness is made of matter" = materialist paradigm. "Matter is made of consciousness" = idealist paradigm. A strange loop? When you collapse the duality of consciousness and matter, what's it called? A philosophical name is the "neutral monad" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_monism although it's a slightly awkward name. So I prefer to call it being, love, suchness or even (on a good day) God instead.

@Denys I don't have an easy answer but I've been contemplating Nothing and Everything for the last couple of days. My sense is that nothing doesn't become something (or the multitude of things in the universe = "everything"). Rather, nothing and everything are identical to begin with. Another thought, we can't really think of nothing; trying to hold nothingness as a thought, a concept, means there's something there in our minds rather than true nothingness, which is a complete absence of thought. So it's a paradox. Also, "everything" is a paradox. To think about everything, you also need to include yourself, the thinker, so you need to encompass both the subject (the thinker) and object (the thought). The thinker needs to think itself, it's a strange loop. Or, you need to collapse the duality of thing/nothing existence/non-existence.

Ok, but this will be seen relatively depending on your understanding of God. Most folks are SD blue or orange, so will read a return to God as going back to the traditional religions which we've already had for millennia, without solving the problems of hunger and poverty. Even fundamentalists and radicals would agree with the basic statement. You may have covered this in your deleted post - don't you just hate it when that happens . So how do we give 'God' (aka religion or spirituality) a nudge up the development scale to help humanity progress?

hey, what if this thread is a mods sting operation to see who is just goofing around and not doing the serious work !

The internet is full of trolls, jealousy, hidden agendas etc so I'm not surprised at the reaction, sad as it is. I already filter out the psychedelic side to his work, and on the forum, because it's not my path, is mostly illegal here, and other people I know are opposed to "recreational drugs" as they call them. But even through that filter there's much wonderful wisdom to find.

ha ha this thread is like spiritual graffiti

@Consilience there's something valuable to learn around the area of control & intention vs non-control & letting be. I'm not saying I have the answers but it's worth contemplating and observing the mind when it appears we are doing these things. I often read forum posts about how free will is illusory (which seems to refer to something very much like control/intention) . Similarly, choosing a practice of letting be, intentionally fixing a time of day to have this discipline, contains paradoxes when you put it that way. "Both positions are empty of inherent truth." yes that's a good way of putting it, alternatively we could say that it's a false dichotomy because we haven't fully grasped the reality of the creative process which is our minds.

@Corpus yeah, good points. For TMI, I'm starting by skim reading through to get a feel its content before deciding whether to do a serious study. As my reading time is limited (busy life!) I need to choose my longer projects with care - my reading list is long and I'm a slow reader. The question at the back of my mind is, is the person's behaviour in real life going to be reflected in the quality of their writing/videos etc. Come to think of it, the reason why I got the TMI book and started watching Leo in the first place was other people's recommendations who I trusted. A bit like choosing a plumber

Answer's in the question - if something lasts forever, it is nothing (no-thing, void, empty).

I can kind of understand why there's so much scepticism around the subject of 'new religious movements', just because there have been so many high profile cults in the past and people are wary of being suckered into something by a glossy and friendly looking exterior. Sex and money scandals don't help the cause either - eg when I was just about to start reading The Mind Illuminated this month, I yahoo'd Culadasa to discover he'd been sacked from a spiritual teaching position for committing adultery. That's leaving me in two minds whether to continue reading his book, is that narrow minded of me? There's lots of opinions around posing as facts nowadays. Anyway, the upshot is that Leo is growing his audience, is making a living out of it, and hasn't had anything negative proven against him so it's as good as you can expect? (I never heard of retargeting funnels before so can't comment on that).

@Someone here sorry to hear you're going through this, but it's going to be worth it, perhaps the toxins deep inside your chest are coming out. Have you tried steam inhalations with essential oils, eg lavender which is a good all round healing herb.

@Luna you're welcome By the way, you're quite right that manta meditation is different from mindfulness meditation. They're just different methods, mindfulness isn't some sort of standard to compare others to. I did actually get good results from TM and 'transcended' regularly, my first mystical experiences, got relaxation, de-stressed, low blood pressure etc, so I'm grateful for all of that. It was a valuable learning experience for sure, I've no regrets, no hard feelings to the TM people, but no doubt we all would do things differently with the benefit of hindsight.

Hi, the TM I was taught, by an official teacher, wasn't a different technique to the other youtube / book ones really. I sat, eyes closed, and repeated the mantra silently to myself for 20 minutes, twice a day. That's it. I've had the same method in regular yoga classes. I think there are more advanced TM stages, called the Siddhi programme, but they didn't explain them, they weren't included in the price. But good on you for wanting to commit this much to your practice, whatever you choose - I just looked up the price on the official TM website. Don't forget it's the practice you put in which brings results, not the money or how it's packaged by the teachers. Think about how you're going to establish a regular daily practice in your schedule.

I used to smoke when I was a student. I wanted to give up but couldn't till the stress of exams was over, although I tried many times. I managed to cut down, but stopping altogether proved too much for my will power. Out of desperation I chose a day to quit, smoked a whole pack in the evening until I felt completely sick, but forced myself to keep on smoking when I hated it. That seemed to reprogram my brain somehow out of the belief that smoking was nice - my last memory of smoking was pretty unpleasant. Like DIY aversion therapy I guess. Some years later when I was in London I visited an exhibition called Body Worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_Worlds which showed dissected and preserved human and animal bodies. Pretty gruesome for sure, also quite artistic, and it had some lungs on display - smokers next to non-smokers and the difference was amazing, Also bodies with cancer. I never forgot it and want to keep healthy now! Yeah, it still took a couple of months for the nicotine cravings to fully die down. But they did, and the improvement in my fitness, sense of taste and smell was brilliant too! Like all the benefits of going jogging without the hard work! Keep at it and it will be really worth it.

I know about my own direct experience, but to say something doesn't exist because I'm not aware of it is going too far IMO. I don't know what I don't know, just because I can't prove something's existence (by being aware of it) doesn't prove it doesn't exist. Absence of proof isn't proof of absence. On the other hand, every object we do 'know' about is built up theoretically from the building blocks of awareness and thought. Let's think about the human process. We're born as babies who have an oceanic awareness without thought or delineating 'everything' into 'things'. Then we gradually learn to discern different things - eg mummy, daddy, hunger, food, warm, cold, toys, sounds, colours etc, which we are taught have names (special types of sounds which label or point to an experience). So, by the time we've grown up we have various layers going on. Direct awareness itself. Carving up and dividing awareness into named 'things'. Creation of conceptual models about the causes of our carved-up awareness. In this way, the entire objective universe we 'know' is actually a gigantic mental map which has been constructed by ourselves and our culture. Including the structure of an inner subjective experience and an outer objective world 'causing' the experience. @arlin "If you go down this rabbit hole you will go crazy, im warning you." Too late, by the time I got to your post I was already half way down and couldn't turn back ?

? If will is controlled by an ego, it isn't free

The existence / non-existence pair is a deep one, my thoughts around this subject are a bit hazy. Here goes: - For me to make a statement like 'unicorns don't exist' I must first define what a unicorn is, and therefore effectively create a unicorn in my imagination. - So I'm saying unicorns do exist in thought/image but don't exist in another realm like the physical reality. - The statement 'unicorns don't exist' therefore occupies a dualistic conceptual framework. From a nondualistic framework, presumably there's no split between mind and matter, imagination and physical reality. Imagined and physical unicorns are just as real or unreal as each other. I'm close to saying that there's neither existence nor non-existence of things in the nondual framework, just (being); but the paradox is holding me back. Perhaps I just haven't yet realised what existence/non-existence really means.