mandyjw

You can't focus on nothing, because there is no such thing, nonduality. There cannot be a substantial you, who is lacking something in some way. There just can't. Doesn't work out. It doesn't math. But we try to do it all the time. "I don't have what I want, I'm not the way I want, etc." An outright, explicit thought is already moving in the direction of what we want but most of these thoughts are just accepted and not even recognized, verbalized or intentionally, consciously thought. The only thing you can actually do is envision what you want, or appreciate what is there. LOA works the same way to find your favorite pair of socks that has been missing for two months, or in spiritual "progression". In fact, there's no real difference. Your missing/found socks are actually a profound mystical experience. But you think you and your socks are mundane, so you color over the magic that is there waiting to be noticed and invited in rather than felt as absence of. By the way, in the same way, there are no low quality teachings that you need someone else to help filter out for you. No one is teaching you anything you don't already know.

Oh shit, I'm on the wrong block, singing the wrong note. Or maybe I'm not really, but just singing a song about being on the wrong block just for the fun of imagination.

This kind of conflict is a real asking to question our beliefs about self and other and what we really expect to get both from spirituality and from a partner. What do you really want? I've shared this frustration, but also been blown away at opportune times with how arrogant I was and how my partner could see things and had embodied things that I just plain old wasn't valuing. Sometimes we want to be understood by others, and spirituality is venturing out into something beyond understanding. We see the value of what is beyond understanding, beyond knowledge of self and other, but why do we still carry the need to be understood by others? What are we really seeking?

America was uniquely, unexpectedly shaped by World War II. We tried very hard to stay out of the war and ended up going all in. The timing of it and the accidental circumstances made us rise to power. Accidently. Many Americans, maybe because of this or because it was there before that, have a form of naivete. It has a light side and dark side. It and the principles with which the country was founded (religious freedom), seems to give rise to an atmosphere where people are free to dream. Some amazing things have come because of that.

You shouldn't be afraid of catching an STD from your partner. If he's not really committed or you don't trust him, maybe you're trying to be cool and ok with something you really aren't cool and ok with? You need a partner that is safe to lose yourself with and then you have to drop the blockages that are your own from that point on. Do not proceed to point B without making sure that point A is taken care of. If you are having problems orgasming, look into that on your own. Learn. Explore. Tell your partner about it. If he doesn't care about it, that's not a good sign. Sex is about giving pleasure and then learning that what reeeally gives your partner pleasure is also giving pleasure, until no one knows who is giving or getting. Do you believe or did you have expectations about how you're supposed to have sex and that it's supposed to be amazing? Sometimes what we think something should be gets in the way of what it is and sex is all about being present. Instead of thinking about what you fear and what you do not want, let your imagination roam. Focus on what you do want. How else will you discover what turns you on if you aren't willing to explore your own experience? Forget what you think your sex life should like, or what you think other people's sex lives are like. Forget about how it's not what you thought. No experience is what we thought it would be. Be only interested and focused on your own experience.

You can do whatever you dream of, the universe is literally always giving the means by which you can do it, it's throwing the cash at you but then all you can think of is questions and fears of why you can't. To go further Leo might stand for wisdom and the counting money with you symbolizes further studying and focus on wisdom itself. I'm not a dream expert, I just interpreted it as if I dreamed it, so you'll have to feel if it resonates or not.

The questioner is coming from a paradigm assuming that people have bad energies that in her attempt to heal them, she takes on. Fear, separation. Those are the illusory bad energies. I think Sadhguru is just pointing beyond this, where real impersonal healing happens? I agree, but this can be profoundly powerful, like holding or being a safe space for someone to experience the expansion that they are. People can seem to provide focus, and that expansion at the same time. But how could you possibly be a safe space for healing if you were concerned about taking on other people's energies? Or if you DO seem to experience taking "other people's energies"? That's probably the reason I've spent most of my life as a hermit. Or how you you possibly heal when you expect that a healer has some power over you that you don't have? Wouldn't the healing be the shared allowance of that power?

They say nonexistent to point you in the other direction of what you've already believed all your life. If you see a mirage of water in the desert, what you see, the mirage, is real. It's just not actual. Like you can't drink the water in the desert you saw, you can't die or find your separate self.

You become passionately dispassionate. It doesn't matter what's happening. That can look like celibacy or it can look like sex. Celibate person might be in the throws of ecstasy, person having sex might be miserable. Who knows, who cares? You want someone beautiful and amazing to fuck you, because then you can accept yourself as beautiful and amazing. Then you stop thinking that you're beautiful and amazing and your partner stops being beautiful and amazing, and you think the change happened in them and not you. So you look for someone else who can make you feel that way. You already are that. Fuck beautiful amazing people, fuck ugly people and enjoy the liberation of not having to be beautiful and amazing anymore, fuck no one. Nothing changes. You're the ecstasy.

@tsuki I don't know. All sexuality is just a murky reflection of desire for God. If you know how one works you know how the other works. It starts with the deception of other than, so that they can merge. Ultimate safety and throwing caution to the wind completely is a paradox that exists without conflict only outside of mind. So we lose our minds when we fall in love. Physical attraction uses this same mechanism for its own manifestation. When you master something, you do it almost mindlessly, no need to think, it just happens. So true mastery mimics that state of no mind which is naturally, prime territory for attraction.

Here's a Rupert Spira pointer I just read that I really liked. Just like your thoughts don't have independent existence from your mind, individual minds don't have independent existence either.

Love is just something that turns off your survival mode of functioning. Because sex is historically incredibly risky for women, we're wired so that a man who throws caution to the wind actually makes us feel safe to do the same.

Hey, in an age of endless choices of entertainment always available and at your finger tips, God gotta keep up with the competition.

My awakening was proceeded by discovering poison nightshade growing wild on the grave of a clairvoyant herbal doctor. There were several other subtly strange experiences around his grave, and I thought that it was so strange and ironic to see nothing growing by his grave but a poisonous plant. So I read his book. It opened my eyes to the mystical intuitive side of the spirituality I was pursuing and more. How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? There are entrances everywhere. Or none other but now.

I agree, but most of those videos are really for entertainment. I'm not saying it's right or wrong but why? We'd do better to observe and be curious about ourselves and why we are fascinated or horrified by the things we are. The identification with the body drives a lot of our behaviors. I suspect that we study tragic bizarre things with fascination and horror, trying to figure out how to prevent them from happening to ourselves.

@Keyhole Those can be means of emotional and physical pain projection. We try to imagine these experiences as if we knew what they were like. We are projecting and imagining something that feels terrible. Why?

Why are there all kinds of plants with incredible medicinal uses? Seems too good to be true.

@arlin No particular way, it's always been there. Everyone has a desire to know truth and love, and when you realize that awareness itself is the desire to know truth and love, you realize you already are what you're looking for. Feeling it and embodying it seems to be a process, but that's also what's wanted.

@Preety_India This is really great if you haven't read it. https://www.amazon.com/Womens-Bodies-Wisdom-Revised-Emotional/dp/0553386735

If it was, it would be disappointing. If it was not, it would be disappointing. Neither is nor not is the goldilocks, just right zone in which we "are", like Jim says, it's already what's wanted. I like the word full.

All your mind can do is imagine "not" as something. Usually something scary, like a void. If it notices the lack of something, (which is actually itself imagining the lack of something) which it can never experience, it has to create the lack of something, which is something. I hope that makes sense, it really sounds like I'm talking round in circles, which I am because I'm describing a strange loop process of something creating itself.

I connected a lot of dots when my Grandmother died. She was 93, so it was easy to accept but still I loved her very much. The grief drove me deeper into intuition and connection I wasn't conscious of before. It felt like an expansion and clarity of love rather than loss and when it didn't I was able to see the clarity every now and then again. I started listening to Abraham Hicks clips at the same time who said to look for someone you lost where they are and not where they are not. As you go deeply into nonduality, this pointer makes sense on every level and can be experienced. Rather than grief it's a kind of profundity and beauty that can be covered over if you only look where you believe something that once was is no longer. You have to go to them where they are, they won't come to you because your assumption that something is lost is mistaken.

It helps to think about what dreams are trying to heal or show to you, to think about the symbolism rather than taking them face value. Also apply that curiosity to event in real life. This is all the dream. Heavy contemplation will sometimes lead to insights during sleep or rest in my experience. It's like building muscles. You actually rip them apart when you're working hard at lifting weights, but during rest you build them back better than before.

I ADORE Jim Newman. All these teachers are very different ways of pointing you toward the same thing. You can point to the same thing coming from vastly different directions. "It's" not located anywhere or directional but language pointing someone to something is and has to be. With Jim Newman, remember that there is no such thing as an absence of the thing. So he's throwing all these possible beliefs you're holding onto at you and squashing them ruthlessly like a bug. Love it. Also some people can only grasp the Jim Newman direction of pointing at stuff, and still believe that "not" is actually not. Other teachers will trigger them by talking about what it is.

@Adamq8 Couldn't pick one, I'm a total teacher whore. Right now, Rupert Spira. I had a huge breakthrough after discovering Abraham Hicks, but started out devouring everything Eckhart Tolle after discovering Leo's videos years ago. Also found Jim Newman incredibly helpful recently. Nahm on the forum has helped me immensely and so has just about everyone on the forum. The further I go the more the common vein of what everyone is saying clicks. This is leaving out so many people and events that worked out for me at the time too though. Bottom line, there are no teachers but there just seems to be a whole lot of love.