mandyjw

It makes sense that like the entire universe was scattered when the big bang happened, that the same would happen with ourselves. Therefore we all have to travel in different directions to meet. If we both wanted to meet at the statue of Liberty, coming from opposite ends of the country, the directions we would need to follow would look very different, that is until a certain point in which they might converge at the end.

@peanutspathtotruth For sure, both need to be acknowledged, and there's no need for a war between the two. Although the thing about war is, it can never go on forever and then everyone has to refocus their efforts to build a better world in peace.

But we come down off them and live in a world made up of symbols and perspectives. Integration is part of awakening, integration with the appearances of the world. What does it say when we are willing to submit and give ourselves fully to a substance, but not to another person? Which possibility is more terrifying? Which turns our stomach more?

@Leo Gura It's a type of deep surrender or devotion experience. The psyche only allows it to happen if there is someone to literally talk to and surrender to. The love that arises in the letting go of old things you never knew were blocking you is incredible. When I was a kid I started to develop what I later decided was OCD, but it was mostly targeting my biggest fears, embarrassments or my religion. Most of my life was spent with a compulsion to keep myself pure. My parents had extraordinarily high moral standards about how you should treat other people. I got compulsions to accept the devil into my soul, voices out of nowhere that drove me into deep depression. I got lots of compulsions to confess things to people, that was maddening. One particular one made me literally sick for a week before I told my mom. Before I had an awakening a few months ago, voice from outside myself came back, all were tied to repression. Directly before they got stronger and stronger. I realized that I was very impure in spirit, I saw all my repression. I saw for the first time the Devil as an integral part of God in nonduality. I channeled confessions to the other member who helped me in the journal section. I never intended to confess anything to him, I thought he would help me let go of my first mystical experience because I thought I was deluding myself. Then I thought he would help me write a book. But I started channeling confessions, I realized that I was impure in spirit, I saw that my ego believed I was good and it was false. My love for the other member and for existence itself turned it into an experience that was absent of effort. Hashing out painful stupid details of my life was thrilling. The key is, that you cannot "see" yourself like another can. You also cannot experience the surrender of confession unless there is someone who appears to listen. Sure it's just God, but as surely as we exist on this forum, God exists outside of you, here to assist you and help you see and experience God's love. We raise each other up in the mutual love and understanding that we are One. Have you experienced all facets of God and the ways in which he awakens himself?

I've been reading a lot about the path to enlightenment for creative people. Ultimately it is possible to complete both paths, it helps if you think of the infinity symbol being composed of two loops that are one. Where you start and what direction you must travel is determined by what gifts you were born with or what kind of mind you have. We all start out with some imbalance. The Secret of the Golden Flower, which I just finished today is the most well balanced meditation guide I've ever read for acknowledging the creativity that flows through the space of clear awareness without allowing it to take you too far into getting lost in experience. I think it really helps explain the differences we see in people's understanding and their unique preference for different practices.

@Arhattobe Awesome and very helpful, thanks for not sitting by the pool ALL day. @Leo Gura You know how if you truly still your mind, true creativity comes through? What is the difference between that true creativity and Love? Is one a force that drives the other, or are they one? Is it possible that some people act as frequency holders and that others are overwhelmed with the energy and drive to create and express love?

@seeking_brilliance We are in this together, I did everything alone for years and have had much more rapid growth since becoming more active on the forum. It's equally problematic to be fiercely independent than it is to be dependent.

@Zigzag Idiot It's great to see you! I finished The Secret of the Golden Flower, it's really good. I haven't read all the commentary yet. There were huge problems with the earlier translations and Jung's misunderstanding of it.

@Zorka Why do two opposite ends of a magnet attract? Why do we need to love and be loved? The answer can't be found intellectually. You can't be sold on the benefits of it as if I were trying to convince you to buy a supplement from me. We seek the truth because we just can't help ourselves.

Well, the good news is you went really deep in a really short amount of time. Examine the fear itself, where does IT come from? Control and lack of control is a duality, neither is the actual case, or rather they both are true simultaneously. You're experiencing a bit of ego backlash from realizing this. We often get sold on the idea that happiness and joy will be the result of this work, but reaching a depth of understanding means we have to peel back layers of protection, so it helps to acknowledge that the process can be uncomfortable.

Living up to the title of my journal is a challenge. Can't we just skip ahead to the part where the boy wakes up and becomes a man? It hasn't been written yet you say?

You are right, from my experience, you can tap into information and connection from "past lives" that you resonate with, if the both you had/have a deep passion, shared interest or a shared goal, you may become energetically connected and receive certain communications to help pass the torch on. It could be any type of unfinished business. Source or Oneness uses different channels to communicate, past lives are just one way, ultimately they are an illusion but the same can be said about your entire world and your very self.

Yes, shortly before my awakening I started studying the law of attraction, and I realized how dead I was inside, and how my ego had co-opted spirituality to steer myself away from a life of following passion and inspiration. The magic of life was already starting to unfold before my eyes and it just needed me to open to it. Can you see what a masculine trait/bias it is to say that talking through issues is highly inefficient? A woman with that kind of past trauma and a tendency to hide from her own pain would need a lot of emotional support and guidance to handle psychedelics in that situation. Kundalini energy is partly sexual in nature and works differently in many women. It's dangerous to risk overloading it, opening up to raw sexual energy without having done the ground work of depersonalizing the trauma. One thing that I uncovered during my awakening was how much fear there is inherent in being female and living in this world. We conflate our self worth with being sexually attractive, and that becomes a source of daily fear and insecurity in itself even if we are never abused. There are a lot of collective shadows around identity with gender and repression or neurosis about sex itself that awakening can show you, but you still have to live in a world where they exist. The freedom comes from letting go of it being your own personal problem and viewing it as a collective "pain body" or energy that only exists as a sensation beyond one's own story of it. Talking with others and seeing/feeling that those feelings are shared rather than being unique to you is the first step in letting go of the personal story. Many women are wired to talk through their feelings naturally, many men are not, hence men have tremendous breakthroughs with psychedelics.

The choosing/chosen duality merges. We are all the chosen one, because we chose ourselves, and we are all One. Love directed toward something is focus without effort, the word focus implies effort so it's probably not the best way I could have chosen to describe it.

No, I've never taken psychedelics.

Are you sure that the conflicted motivation isn't just a sign of not being ready? I'm not sure any method would work if you weren't really passionate about doing it. I believe the desire to do it is key, at least is was for me. Thank you. My experience was a bizarre combination of a lot of those things. I had no idea what was happening at the time, and am still working to understand it. I feel the need to pay it forward.

I'm really embarrassed to admit this but I think it's important. Someone on this forum acted as a nondual therapist for me in the journal section a few months ago. I started channeling my past stuff and doing shadow work, it got really messy. I could see exactly how I had as God written the story of life, and how every traumatic experience I went through was an opening of some kind. I could see how perfectly beautifully it all was designed and orchestrated. I had an awakening, third eye opening, mystical experiences, heart chakra burst open, bliss states for days on end. I had to hide the journal since because it was ridiculously personal. I say this because maybe the same thing can work for others. Maybe what happened was a unique situation, and it would be dangerous or useless to try to recreate it, I'm not sure. Psychotherapy and psychedelics are great but practically they are only available to very few. Psychotherapists don't lead you into nondual understanding with pointers. Psychedelics aren't a structured way to do shadow work. Both have their own drawbacks, and there are a lot of people on this forum who can't access either. Is there a third option?

The reason that feminism has created a shadow is that it is based on giving women the same opportunities to be successful in a culture that already has masculine values. Leo is right, it's not feminism that is the problem, it's a necessary response. But feminism itself has already surrendered to the masculine paradigm and just isn't conscious of it yet. What we need is feminism 2.0, but that will require a higher consciousness society. Until then both men and women will suffer because of imbalance. Would you laugh at someone who washes out and puts a band aid on a scrape and say that it just has to heal on it's own? No, because even though it's true that it has to heal on it's own, doing the thing to ensure that it does heal is necessary and responsible.

@seeking_brilliance Sorry I can't be much help here, I never had a formal self inquiry practice. My self inquiry process was weird and intuitive, and I'm not a great teacher for it. I need to further research it and understand it better. Follow your intuition, I know there are many masters of self inquiry here on the forum, I'm not one of them though. I do know that Ramaji has some great videos on self inquiry though.

@Surfingthewave No, but I don't know what went on with his own family. The beautiful opportunity is a love awakening. It's literally a can't eat, can't sleep fallen in love with life itself feeling of oneness. The object/guru/God acts as a focus point through which the power of love is concentrated, then the love grows to contain all that is. It opens yourself up to a power that causes you to act uncharacteristically, you aren't yourself anymore. It's the same thing that happens when you fall in love, the very same mechanism, only with an intention for enlightenment and nondual understanding it expands to include everything. Blind devotion is an unwillingness to consider or explore other paths. Can you see the subtle difference between focusing on something with all your power and choosing something in exclusion of other options?

The night before last I went to historical society presentation on Dr. Pomroy. As I walked in my old music teacher from gradeschool who didn't recognize me, asked if I was going to the presentation. I said yes and he said "Dr. Pomroy lives again." An older man remembered the aftermath of the fire well, and stories from it. He said that no matter what they did, they couldn't get water up there and ended up pumping it from below. Funny that he had a Rebekah at the Well statue and fountain. He owned another farm called "Red Gate Farm", maybe where he grew up. There's a beautiful photo of it, him and his wife are on the lawn and standing in the gate are Eva Eye and Thomas Eye, his niece and nephew who he took in. Last night I did my third walk at night under a full moon and went all the way to visit Pomroy's grave. It wasn't as scary to be in the cemetery at night as I had imagined but it was still an adrenaline rush. I laid down in front of his monument and looked up at the stars. In my vision was the monument reaching to the sky and the branches of the trees across hanging down with the star flecked sky in between. There's nothing left really, no spirits to haunt, but a beautiful place full of nature and energy, created in the moment in consciousness of it. I began to tap into those feelings, that haven't come from my own experiences. I was pulled out from them by the insight, "It's your life." I left him an acorn that had fallen from the oldest tree on his property and forgotten about in my pocket. I felt the warmth of the granite stone that covers his grave, carved to point upwards like a pyramid. As my hands were on the stone something thrashed loudly underneath the stone. A snake? I went back down the steps with my heart still pounding and a sense of peace. This experience was nothing, like all the rest have been.

OK, I'll watch it. I understand stage blue and spiral dynamics pretty well but I'm sure there's always a greater depth to it. When my husband and I were still engaged, my inlaws built their own beautiful church building because they are wealthy and didn't like any of the other churches around. They found this new Pastor who was very charismatic, but turned out to evil itself. I tried to pretend that I was not a she devil, and even attended almost every Sunday and pretended while everything was screaming inside me "NO!" but this pastor saw through me. As soon as he was given the position he started getting involved in the lives of church members, and tried to force my fiance to apologize for dating me and for going to a nearby college for engineering rather than a Bible college. My husband refused to apologize so his entire family shunned him for an entire year and left him with less than two weeks to figure out financing for his last year of college. They did it all out of blind obedience to their pastor. The Pastor continued to rip his way through every single family in the church. After a year passed my inlaws woke up and kicked him out of the church but not before he had done a lot more damage to other families. They called the past churches the Pastor had been in charge of and he had done the same thing there. I can tell you endless stories like this, my parents have their own version of this story that's worse. My point is, I've seen and lived through that monomaniacal devotion more than you know. It only served to clarify what real devotion was and felt like and lead me further down that path. Understanding spiral dynamics (thanks to your videos) has given me a lot of peace and understanding to move beyond anger about the past. I'm trying to make a distinction between devotion to a God or a mystical place, etc, which inevitably leads someone to their own intuition, guidance and inner being. That is entirely different from loyalty and love for one's own group or leader (collective ego). In my inlaw's church they loved to sing this song that went something like "Obedience is your very best friend, it shows that you believe." Stage blue devotion looks like obedience out of fear or love that is actually an egoic inclusive pride. Mystical devotion is pure Love. Every stage on the spiral embodies an understanding that is integrated, understood and experienced with a much greater depth, not thrown away. I'm afraid that if people here in this community conflate stage blue devotion to one's own community or religion based on their "idea" of God... with stage turquoise or transition to turquoise devotion to a deity, that they will overlook a breathtakingly beautiful opportunity. Leo, you are a master of understanding. There's no end to understanding, it's infinite. It's key to breakthroughs and insights, yes. Psychedelics are a path of devotion, surrender to an "other", surrender to a substance, but they'll always wear off. They are the prostitute of enlightenment. You can't expect her to stick around the next morning to pick your undies up off the floor for you and make breakfast. "Mind fuck" is not an accidental term. Find your Goddess. She doesn't actually exist outside of you of course, but she'll show you the way. Or God rather, if you'd prefer.

Sigh... "Was I talking in my sleep?" "Snoring."

@Leo Gura Why do you think Catholic churches have their members make confessions?