Bodhitree

There are a few different ways to approach “your demons”. The first is on an intellectual level, by looking at the darkness in your own behaviour. Anger, fear, hatred, jealousy can all be powerful negative forces within our lives, and if you can examine their roots, you can overcome them. Insight and consciousness of how they work within you are the key. This kind of shadow work i generally encourage. The second is on an psychic level. Which means basically go looking for them. This I don’t recommend, as an entity usually has some amount of independent agency. You may find yourself saying in a psychically charged environment, I wish to meet a small devil, and find this entity using all your worst, most self destructive impulses against you.

Aha! And you think that someone else does ?

Well... we know that everything is impermanent. And we know that there is suffering.

There are some worthy tv shows and movies, but most are just entertainment. If you were to do as the OP suggested and watch IMDB’s top 250 shows you’d be watching everything from Breaking Bad to Dragonball Z, and not for example The Good Place. I’d suggest filling your spare time 50-50 with worthy self improvement and the right kind of entertainment, by which I mean stuff that won’t rot your brain and that at least has some morals.

Read the Kalama Sutra, spoken by the Buddha some 2500 years ago.

I know what engineering is. So perhaps Sadhguru is misrepresenting what his course actually does, and just wants to use a cool-sounding name...

I agree, it can turn into a big time sink, while in fact you’re not getting anything back for your efforts, it’s just entertainment, and it can install some really bad habits.

Volt got 3 seats in the Parliament according to the adjusted exit poll, and in some cities were as high as 6.4% of the vote. They will participate in the upcoming German and Hungarian elections as well.

I came across this initiative today, it was started by Ecosia where they are putting together a debit card where they take the processor’s payment, typically 2.5% of the money spent, and use it to plant trees. They estimate that for every 60 dollars spent on the card there will be one tree planted. It’s another really clever scheme where Ecosia are taking the man-in-the-middle payment to create a way for consumers to vote with their feet and by making the right choices help fix the planet. It in effect extracts shareholder value from the system and by funnelling it into a non-profit helps correct environmental problems. The choice of planting trees is clever too, because it helps forest habitat, it helps topsoil, it helps fresh water, it helps the CO2 balance in the atmosphere, it’s a really good way forward. You can register your interest in getting a Treecard at http://treecard.org/

Inner engineering. How can you apply the science of nuts and bolts to the inner world. The answer is you cannot. The name makes no sense.

Well said. The mind and its processes of understanding are not really the core of experience, although we western people often like to think so. Being conscious of experience happens outside the mind.

@vladorion I agree. I don’t rate Sadhguru. Some of the things he says are ok, others not, and that means he can’t be trusted to guide you.

Just... facepalm.

Well, the reason for the car not having 5 wheels is because of the minimum viable design. If you have more than the minimum viable design dictates of anything, then you are wasting money on unnecessary features and at best are designing a luxury product.

Less understanding, more being.

@NOTintoxicated My experience is that there are ways to call upon helper entities which expend themselves and eventually kind of evaporate into a higher state. I think you accessed one of those during your marijuana high. Recently I contacted a very clever something that called them ‘virtual intelligences’. There are various problems one can encounter, mostly by trying to talk to them or give them tasks, which will often take them onto destructive paths, so it’s best to do exactly what you already did, let it do its thing, make space for it, allow it to fulfill its duty.

I’ve found I’m a lot more sensitive to violence these days, it’s so unnecessary.

Let’s just say there are some people here who are genuinely highly developed, and some people who have a conceptual understanding and know the language, and some people who are still seeking, and some people who are just taking a good long look.

Some people claim knowledge of this, but I don’t think they were reliable types. I’ve never come across it myself.

It’s not really important to grasp or to know. As you said, nothing really matters all that much, and most evil in the world is done by people who care too much about something above the well-being of their fellows. Calmness and equanimity are great friends.

You could try going to a local park to meditate...

There is no such thing as religious truth. Religions are built on the words of deceased enlightened teachers, and those words are twisted and edited to suit a purpose, and even in their original pure state they were only fingers pointing to the moon. There is also no such thing as scientific truth. There are only theories which have withstood some measure of critique and are temporarily accepted until a better idea comes along. It’s a vague edifice of not much more than a few principles.

On Eckhart Tolle. It’s possible that there is something to reincarnation and that it takes several lifetimes to become enlightened. You don’t know what path Eckhart walked to get where he arrived. Also, effort does not necessarily get you anywhere. There is a Zen story, a young man visited a Zen master and asked him, if I become a monk how long will it take me to become enlightened? Ten years, replied the Zen master. And if I really work hard at it? Twenty years. I’ve heard the proces of enlightenment being compared to relaxing a fist that has been held tightly clenched for so long that it refuses to open on its own. It’s not about effort, it is about achieving a natural state of quiet, ease, understanding and relaxed surrender. And then you wait... it’s not you who does this, there is a grace associated with it.

There is no balance. There is no cosmic justice. The reward for goodness is just knowing that you have done the right thing, and that should be enough, without knowledge of further reward.

It is possible to live in honesty. But you have to realise, sometimes you have to present your best possible face. You meet a woman, you want her to like you, are you immediately going to tell her all the reasons to dislike you? Everything she should know about you, straight upfront? I don’t know anyone who has met his prospective wife like that...