mandyjw

@Shin have you tried a neti pot? They cut the symptoms pretty well, but don't make them go away. It took me a long time to realize that I had developed a dust mite allergy to my down comforter and winter coat.

I'm having trouble putting things into words that don't diminish or trivialize what I mean. The changes with the forum and the stage I'm in make me feel like posting less and less. I don't want the zen master to smack me. I was the little girl in school who was gutted when the teacher had to speak to me. I see my ego in my stories and my comparisons and my likes and dislikes. What is there to write about? I see my ego in needing to share my life with others. Is that connection or ego? I see my ego in thinking I sound smarter if I don't say anything at all. I shall be silent and pretend to be a zen master. I could totally fake it, behind a screen on the internet. Ok, maybe some would see through it.

Ooooo... I LIKE this thought. I think so too.

Kids know the difference. I never believed in Santa, my parents told me he was just a story from the very start. Christmas was still magic in itself. That's the thing about magic. It just is.

@DrewNows Are there impurities? Are the impurities outside of the belief that there are impurities and separate selves who have or do not have them?

Leo's fear and hesitancy, putting himself in this difficult position of power, it's just all just for the experience of greater love and connection. It isn't fulfilling to follow in the footsteps of others, when you know there is only One. Until he knows that his love is pure, he won't show it. There's nothing more offensive to God than trying to fake love. Better to be a child yelled at by a parent who loves you than hugged by a parent who secretly hates you.

I keep tricking myself into thinking it's "my" ego. This sounds really simple and silly in comparison to what you wrote here. I sat to mediate with the windows open and my neighbors were carrying on outside. So the meditation became a unique kind of practice. And somehow I got the insight that it's not my ego. Focus on the ego being "my" "problem" is my problem.

Sometimes what looks like a meaningless joke to someone is a profound insight for some else. Are we here to learn or are we here to unlearn? Or both? I appreciate so much the work that goes into running this place, I'm sure we can all strike a balance together if we ground ourselves in love for this community and one another.

Fascinating question. I've been noticing as I try to bring in more body awareness and stomach breathing that it's almost like... disclaimer, this is going to sound really stupid... It's like I can pinpoint my ego and it's just this sort of unsettled nauseous feeling. It has the potential to go away and give way to peace or grows to make me literally nauseous. It's what I believed to be fear, resistance, annoyance and my ego itself and all it is is this feeling in my stomach that my brain was interpreting to be ALL sorts of awful things. When I go into conscious breaths or belly breathing, that's all that's left. So how to make it go away? I should trick it into being my friend and then push it off a cliff while we're out walking together someday? Ideas?

@tsuki You're making me all nostalgic.

I would just stare at the sun if I didn't know I wasn't supposed to.

I guess it's that either everything just is, or if everything has a "purpose" that purpose is to awaken us. Things that are scary but also fascinating to think about kind of pull you into exploring mystery and the unknown and the nature of fear itself.

Aliens are attractive to our culture because they make great stories and are well, terrifying. But we have still a lot of ideas about them, even the word alien congers up an image. We want to understand the bigger, greater infinite unknown and sometimes it helps to assign at least some qualities to it. Basically you made up the idea of aliens in your mind, and also in doing so created them in reality so that you could have a more graspable experience of the fear of the unknown. We all personally make up our own things and our experiences all with the same aim.

Think about it as if you were a wave on the ocean. You are the ocean in the entirety but you only know yourself as this one wave. Other waves could crash into you and destroy you so they appear threatening. You could compare your size and location with that of other waves and feel significant or insignificant. You could be afraid of how long you have until you crash into the shore and die. All those thoughts perpetuate the idea of you as a separate wave, even though all those problems dissolve as soon as you identify with being the ocean as a whole. We also have different kinds of thoughts, thoughts about how to create things, manipulate our world, improve our world, thoughts about how to interact with people and communicate with people. We have thoughts of gratitude and appreciate. It's all play. Thoughts bridge the gap between form and formless.The best way to align your thoughts with the formless, is to understand what thoughts are and where they are coming from. Aligning yourself with the energy of formless, (think meditation of all kinds) changes the thoughts you have and also trains you to recognize what kind of thoughts you are having by getting a feel for the energy of them. Not all thoughts are bad, not all thoughts are good. Ultimately and seemingly contradicting everything I just said, it is our judgement of which are bad and which are good that causes us to suffer.

Depression is as much a coach as bliss.

So believe nothing.

She wouldn't believe it.

I don't know. I thought that I had awakened to the fact that I had been repressing and demonizing thinking, I thought that I had freed myself of some duality but it was really not an awakening with great insights but equally a debauchery of self deception the likes of which I've never know. Is "trying" to see thoughts for what they really are trying to be a saint?

Needed this, thanks.

Have you given up on me?

Depression is a mystical state. All states are mystical.

Awesome, thank you for sharing this.

Can you please explain more about what you mean by dropping the saint? I feel like you're from house Slytherin so obviously I have this problem.

@Arhattobe Is it? Or is that the grace of God? Our demand for perfection is a defilement itself.

That's why we still need Jesus. I had a natural awakening at the start of April, I was sleeping generally about two hours or two two hour stretches. At the time I had no way of knowing if or when it would stop, it went on for well over a week and calmed down slowly. In a way it was terrifying because it was beyond my control but now I see the wisdom for living my life now is completely letting go of the experience. I still haven't fully let go, not at all. If I had a magic button to push, I would turn it on again. It makes me think that psychedelics have some powerful advantages and also some powerful drawbacks.