Bodhitree

@Fearey perhaps Gesundheit2’s suggestion of looking at the ego stages model might be good for you. In any case I wish you the best.

@Fearey That does sound to me like you might end up, consciously or unconsciously, gaming the spiral dynamics stages. The way you have presented it in this post does sound like you’re quite caught up in them and the whole idea of progress through them, while in fact it’s just a set of definitions for a number of states of being that are only loosely related. Are you sure you’re not an Orange-style achiever at heart?

Interesting reading, this topic. Generally I don’t pay much mind to human development models, as guides to the path I do not find them very helpful since often they just set out certain markers without much understanding of the evolutionary process itself. So a question for you @Fearey do you try to use the stages as a guide? How do you feel the integral model influences your progress?

It sounds like what you are saying is that you keep touching on the different stages without fully integrating them — you keep going ahead without really addressing where you are at. I think you need to revisit each stage thoroughly to see what you have left undone with an eye to personal advancement.

Perhaps you should have a look at the Sufi dervishes, they are supposed to have a technique to whirl endlessly. Perhaps the impulse to whirl will wear itself out eventually. But I have to say, this expression of spontaneous Qi Gong, of movement following movement, does not sound like something that leads to inner peace. If it were me, I would look for that, an opportunity to find peace and stillness, and maybe from there to do yoga.

Hmmm, I thought on how to do this when I was young, but never could find a way. In the end life’s lessons gave me what I needed. Success in a social setting, learning to lead teams, deal with money, earn people’s respect as a leader. Those things helped me a lot, it all happened after a promotion at work.

@fopylo At the time I came out of university there was still national service in the country I live in, and I made the decision at the time to be a conscientious objector. That meant doing a slightly longer period of civil service, but as you also get work experience for this it wasn’t so bad. No one has ever made a big deal of that decision, or given me a bad time for it. I still think it was the right thing to do. Harming another human being in combat is a very personal thing, and I never want to have a superior telling me to kill someone just because they are ‘the enemy’.

Crazywise, about finding a way through mental health issues.

I’ve heard there are good results with a combination of mdma and talk therapy, there are a number of psychotherapists experimenting with that and it really does seem to work in the case of veterans with ptsd.

A lot of arrogant folks just haven’t had the life experience to let them know that really they know very little…

Impulse9 asked this in another thread, and I thought it was worth a fuller discussion… If you think of all the mind-expanding experiences that you can have on psychedelics, and the relatively few things that stick around afterwards, what is the endgame? The first few times you might get something vaguely spiritual or something indicating the oneness of things, but then after a few more you might get a bad trip, then does it keep bouncing around? Where does it lead, ultimately?

@Gesundheit2 So what do psychedelics heal, ultimately? Leo says “the endgame is infinity”, meaning there is no end to the healing. Generally though when you are looking at healing trauma’s, you are also looking at returning to a natural ground state. Not necessarily a childlike state, but how you might have been at whatever age you are at, like looking in a mirror. In a way our human minds are just error compounded on error, we get given our mother’s beliefs and our father’s beliefs and our teacher’s beliefs, and much of it is shadows and half-truth, things they themselves were passed on or picked up. While our bodies grow and heal naturally, our minds become filled with cultural patterns, and psychedelics help you break down some of that by peaking behind the curtain of reality, according to Terence McKenna anyway. So once you have broken through those cultural patterns, what are you left with? A set of broken remnants which are taken away. It reminds me of something that the Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah once said, that the process of approaching enlightenment is all about letting go. I wonder if it does work like that… I still can’t take psychedelics because of a medicine that I take that interferes with their function, so it might be a while before I can investigate myself.

Thinking that you and any girl you meet are going to be friends and lovers is always more a pleasant daydream than anything you can rely upon. It should make you hopeful, and if things go well you can make it happen. If things don’t go so well maybe not.

I think this is a very important question worthy of discussion in its own rights.

Hmm anxiety over other people’s reactions can be driven by trauma. It is usually fear of an outsized reaction, which is almost always unfounded, that causes the fear to be taken seriously. When you don’t take it seriously but instead say, what is he going do to hurt me, shout really loudly, then you can be a bit more reckless and live openly with the chances you take.

It usually only happens to people who are already sensitive, that they have these experiences. Its a sign that you need to take your mental stability seriously, that the risks of serious bad trips is exacerbated. Personally my view on Law of One things is that you should be careful. You invite these things into your own mind space, by paying attention to them and putting the focus on them, especially if you start working with them. Psychedelics have the reputation of releasing you from built up patterns of society’s orderings, but I’m not sure how they would mix with this kind of mindset. It depends on where you want to go with your explorations. Do you want to do channeling, or perhaps you want to do enlightenment work, or you want to focus on your shadow. Channeling tends to introduce new material into the psyche, enlightenment stuff requires a lot of clarity and insight, shadow work needs honesty and courage. I’d try and get my priorities straight before getting involved.

The problem with Dream is that most people don’t have the drive to create a AAA experience, the dedication to quality, the eye for detail that a great experience is constructed out of. The user content seems to be very mediocre. It’s sad because some of the creation tools are very good and easy to use.

I think the worship of God and Jesus is not healthy especially for people with a mental health issue. It’s a religion with many issues, not least that it promises you all kinds of things after death, which there is no way of testing or checking. It’s not much short of a fever in the brain, which stirs up all manner of irrationality. You’re being asked to take an awful lot of things on trust, which the religion disguises by inventing a special virtue called faith. It is however all hokum, the imaginings of psychotic prophets. I find Buddhism and particularly secular Buddhism a much saner religion. That particular stream is very driven by ehipassiko, come and see for yourself whether a teaching is true or not, and if you find it not to be true just set it aside. Much of what can’t be proven can be treated agnostically, neither held to be true nor false, because there are many things that we cannot know. But that doesn’t mean we should blindly believe in them, or even pass them on to others.

Independence and freedom require hard work.

@Javfly33 I suspect you would be well off with a reduction in stimulation, basically cutting down on caffeine, suger and screen time, and spending some time studying Buddhism in order to find more inner peace and a way of distancing from the mind. Put your effort towards being an observer, don’t get so attached to all the thoughts that fly around in the mind, live a simple life for a while.

I don’t post all that much, but I enjoy the intersection between psychedelics, enlightenment work, and finding emotional depth. It would be a shame if the forum lost that or it’s open character, so I hope you will keep those aspects intact. That said, clearer guidelines on suicide and being life-positive might be appropriate. The discussion of suicide is a significant part of spiritual growth, and shouldn’t be lightly disregarded. However, some basic points from a training on how to talk to suicidal people might be welcome.

Much as I’d like to believe in the human potential, I do believe it is more likely to be something on the order of the idiot savant, not really an awakening but perhaps having flashes of insight.

I believe it’s not likely for the deeply religious to become enlightened. They have committed their lives to following doctrine, and an enlightened man is always highly original, a free thinker, and often a rebel.

You’ve gotten quite close. If you examine your attachments one at a time with insight then you can see their roots. It will usually be some kind of ideal thats held in your mind, maybe an idealised image of how things ought to be. That will lead you to the emotions that lie behind these.

Control carefully what you buy and don’t get distracted in the supermarkets. Decide to eat healthy food in moderation and only snack on small portions of fruit and nuts.