vizual

Hahah doesn't really work that way. You are judging yourself this way on your own judgments, by not judging you are actually judging, lol. Doing this will only waste your energy until you have become tired of it, after that the same old judging will continue again. The only way to stop judging is by bringing more awareness into your experience.

Every tool in existence can be both used and abused. The danger of fixed routines to progress spiritually is that the tool can become internalized by the ego and convince itself it's making progress by doing the routine. The ego loves setting its teeth into a routine which makes itself think it's making progress, it's how it keeps itself going. You can make walking your dog as a meditative tool, or as a tedious chore. The only one who can know which one it is is you, only you. You can go to the best guru and accept all his exercises and guidance but at the end of the day, every single exercise is just dancing around the bush hoping that one day you will say 'aha I see'.

It doesn't really matter when to learn about enlightenment, literally everyone can become enlightened regardless the circumstance. Being is a thing we all share and it does not care about your life circumstances. Will is be harder/easier? It all depends on you, if you truly want to become enlightened you have to be willing to give it all up, everything. If you are not willing to give up all your 'worldly' things, achievements and possessions. You are probably not going to become enlightened. But the funny thing is, you think you are going to be so much happier when you have reached all your dreams you have set out for yourself. But most likely, you are going to find out that this happiness resided in yourself all along. But having said, doing self inquiry and meditate regularly never hurt anyone. The amount of meditators that accidentally become enlightened by just meditating are pretty low. Just meditating and doing self inquiry might even help you attain your goals if they succeed in reducing the clutches of your ego.

Hahah, as long as you are identified with the ego it is impossible to truly accept everything as is. Maybe if you are at the top 0,1% of society and you have attained perfect finances, health, looks, relationships, friendships, career, hobbies etc. Then maybe your ego would back off a bit. But still, it would find something new to nag about. There is nothing to fix, the ego is unfixable. It will always want more. You don't want to fix yourself. You should strive to get rid of the thing that wants to fix itself. If you manage to do that, then you can be free to do the things that make life worth living.

It's like learning to walk a tightrope. How can a professional tightrope walker explain to you how he does it? If he explains how he does it probably does not make much sense to you. He can only give you small tips and tricks that may, or may not, help you on the journey. But eventually you still have to walk that rope yourself. Even if you perfectly pinpointed which muscle at what time the tightrope walker moved to balance himself, that still would not help you much in doing it yourself. You still have to experience the art of tightrope walking yourself.

Something funny he said in another video, which rings true, is that "the whole point of spiritual seeking is the exhaustion of the seeker". The seeker is never actually going to find enlightenment "out there". Every spiritual epiphany you ever think you had is only there to add to the eventual frustration of not finding what you are seeking. There is a beautiful irony in the whole thing.

clifs?

The 'laws' of physics is only a projection of the mind, there really aren't any laws at all. You can literally see and make up laws wherever you look, in chaos there is always order. That's actually a function of the mind, we create and hold on to consistencies in our reality. Even your own mind is a collection of chaotic thoughts, then you make up a consistent story about those thoughts and call them 'you'. The mind is always looking for patterns in its perceived environment, and thus always making up new 'laws'. So why can't everything happen within this awareness? Who says everything is not happening within this awareness? Sure, you can't manifest a flying car on the spot. But awareness is infinite and not bound to only 'you'. Everything that is happening in the universe is happening because that is the most interesting thing that can happen. If everyone would just started manifesting everything they can think up immediately there would be no point to anything anymore. The point of the universe is the journey, not the destination.

There are always two sides to a coin. Yes, it can get very ugly because people attach and identify themselves very strongly with their relationships. But a relationship can also be a very beautiful thing when it puts you in touch with feelings of love and connection which you have never felt before. The problem arises when people think that those feelings can only be felt when being committed in a relationship, Of course, these feelings reside in all of us and can be accessed whether you are in a relationship or not. But it takes more effort to reach these feelings when one is not in a relationship because society is set up in such a way that it is the antithesis of love and connection. So in a way, relationships balance out the cold and hard reality of the rules of our current society. That's why our relationships can feel so powerful because they make us feel more whole as a person. But, you can always choose to become whole regardless of circumstance. But again, this takes effort and anti-brainwashing to get to that point. A healthy relationship is a relationship between two people who have discovered their wholeness inside themselves.

The system perfectly reflects the people that are in the system. For the system to change, the people first have to change. The whole system is setup as a game, and in a game there are always winners and losers. This is a great system because our current thinking paradigm is a win/lose paradigm. When our collective consciousness moves away from a game to a win/win paradigm, then the system can effectively change to suit the new paradigm. Just look around you, people are not ready for a big shift. The majority of people are obsessed with action movies, celebrity gossip, junk food and cat videos. We all obsess over win/lose situations. Look at how desperately we are all clinging to money and our possessions. When you touch my money, you touch me. With such an attitude, the system can never change. And you can't force people to change their attitudes, just look at communism. If there is a win/lose attitude, communism will corrupt people. It's not our job to rebel against society. It's our job to evolve ourselves into a win/win person who lives consciously with his environment. Show society how live ought to be lived so the attitude of people around you can change. Monkey see monkey do, when people see your success, their beliefs shall slowly follow to fit yours.

Tho ego can be a very tricky thing indeed. When we start out in meditation we all start out with different ideas of what an effective meditation session actually is. Maybe a certain feeling, or relaxation, a quiet mind etc. The ego can quickly adapt the meditation to these ideas so that it can feel good that it had a 'productive' meditation session. Of course, there is no such thing as a productive meditation session, you meditate for the sake of meditating. Besides this point, thoughts can also be very context dependent. Certain thoughts and feeling will only come up when triggered by certain external events.But the content of thoughts really does not matter that much, the content is only a reflection of your state. When you are in a retracted state your thoughts will be very defensive and negative. The change of your state can change very subtly.

Be careful your realizations don't drive you into a nihilistic madness. Even if everything is nothing, and nothing is everything, at the end of the day it doesn't matter. Truth is beautiful and loving, use your intellectual realizations only as a sign that you can let go of the intellect.

I can help you, just post the video's in this topic my friend

Actually, not contributing to conversation, not speaking up, not expressing yourself and not giving yourself fully to the world is the most selfish thing you can do. If anything, you should be less selfish.

Get a sanskrit dictionary and pick a word that sounds deep and philosophical, like "adyashanti".

I feel like doctors and general health practitioners get educated as car mechanics, to look at the human body as a biological machine. And while this has its advantages in certain situations(mainly acute situations) it has severe drawbacks. If someone shot me, It's great that the doctor looks at my body as a machine. I want the doctor to evaluate my state by my blood amount, heart rate, blood pressure etc. But if it's something more chronic, or systematic. Things like back pain, diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue, even cancer. Looking at the body as a machine has huge drawbacks, and treating the body like that way will only cover up the symptoms of the disease. The problem is, of course, that these diseases are very complex, and what may have caused diabetes in one person may not have caused diabetes in the other person. Just prescribing insulin is a good middle way to keep everyone happy, it reduces the symptoms and the doctors are happy because the statistics are improving. But ultimately, the best way is a holistic way, where all facets of one's life gets evaluated, not just the hard bodily statistics.

-The Holy Mountain -2001: A Space Odyssey -Spring Breakers (There is a deep spiritual message in this movie almost everyone missed) -Revolver -Vanilla Sky

I see it like this. On one hand there is clear water(awareness) and on the other hand there is sand(thoughts, symbols). When water and sand mix you get muddy water. The awareness is being confused with the thoughts and symbols, the result is an ego that tries to build a huge wall around itself for self defense because it thinks that when the thoughts stop, the awareness stops with it. But the awareness is eternal whereas the thoughts are just a temporary reflection of reality. Of course, this ego defense causes a huge confusion in life with disastrous results. What we all want is to clean up our water, we want a nice layer of sand on the bottom of a glass with clear water. The realization that the thoughts are not the water - even though the thoughts are IN the water. Talking about it, like in this forum, indeed only stirs up the water. You can only clear it up by leaving it alone. But stirring up the water is very helpful in the way that you can come to the realization that stirring it up is not helping in improving your life. Life is great in the sense that you always get feedback in the way you approach things. If you have a big ego, life will throw things at you which will question it's validity.

Hahaha well, the option to not chase anything is there but at the moment you don't really have the option to not chase anything.

Step 1: Become a Billionaire Step 2: Invest it Result: You are now a billionaire investor

Possibly your inability to make friends is related to the way your friends treat you. It's never OK for people to degrade and belittle you. But people unconsciously always look down on people who are needy and insecure.

Desire is a very tricky thing to define, a definition is very likely to be misunderstood by people who are very involved by their ego's. It's also hard to define what the difference is between something that naturally arises out of you and a 'desire'. When a carnivorous plant catches and digests prey, does he do so out of desire or not? Where do we draw the line? I think the 'bad' desire is the kind of desire that grows and uplifts our ego's. We chase that desire because it somehow makes us feel more safe and secure. A big strong ego is a very convincing illusion of safety and power. Of course, this ego will bring all kinds of trouble to your life. If we got rid of this ego it would not necessarily mean that we become monks who sit down and meditate all day. But we become more like the carnivorous plant, we will be at peace all the time, and if we are hungry and a meal appears we eat. There is no need to go around and chase for food all the time, the very act of chasing a desire spoils the true enjoyment one might get from attaining it. The earth has no desire to spin around the sun, but it still does it in peace. Earth knows that flying around all over in the universe would not bring him any more joy than he already has, because Earth is on its path exactly where it is supposed to be. So how do you get rid of desire? Stop labeling stuff and think it will make your life somewhat better, it doesn't. A temporary 'high' always comes paired with a 'low'. The only true 'high' what we really want is the high of pure being, and being is constant. Of course, the 'highs' of desire can be very convincing so there is a lot of consciousness work to do. The more you can raise your consciousness, the more you can see through the false promises of desire.

Can we have a "Chimpery" forum please where we can discuss sports, cars and videogames?

The thing about movement is mind boggling. For movement to exist there need to be at least two separate points to compare its relative distance, if one point is all there is, movement can not be. As an "I", I experience this universe from the notion that I am the centre of the universe and everything relates to me. So everything is at a certain distance from "me". When something appears to move away from me, there seems to be movement, either I am moving away from it or it is moving away from me. Bit this "I" is not a distinct point at all. There is no point in me from which I can start measuring, this me does not exist. I could say that I start measuring from where my eyeballs start, or from the centre of my brain, but these points are not 'me'. The points from which we measure distance is an illusion, these points do not exist. I'd say that the illusion of movement is part of the ultimate expression, but there is no truth in movement. Movement is part of the illusion of 'life'. If this movement did not exist then our lives would immediately become meaningless, we would experience the universe as a rock experiences it, the start of our lives would be exactly the same as the end, it just 'is'. We can only experience a sense of meaning if different, distinct points exist in the universe. But since the points are an illusion, so is the sense of meaning. The universe has no real meaning. I seem 'me' as a sugar cube inside hot tea, in the beginning I can resist that i dissolve inside this tea. I think that I am fighting this tea from tearing me apart. But in the end, it is a losing battle. And in truth, the sugar was a part of the tea al along and I never existed as a distinct cube of sugar. So to relay this back to me, every sensation of separation is an illusion. Whether it be a thought, the feeling of my body, an emotion, a smell or whatever. All these things work only on false presumptions.