cetus

Here's a picture I shot titled "Dark night of the soul"

@astrokeen I was talking to a friend the other day about shrooms. He said he tried them once many years ago and didn't like it at all. He walked into his house and everything around him look depressing. The things he owned that surrounded him and the way he lived all seemed like meaningless shit to him. So he said he never did shrooms again because of the way it made him feel. I didn't say anything but was thinking to myself, "maybe you seen truth for the first time".

@John Iverson What good is that doing you? Read the bk and decide for yourself.

@John Iverson Gerald G. Jampolsky MD. He wrote a very inspiring book called 'Love is Letting Go of Fear'

@Harikrishnan Don't forget to wear your 3rd eye glasses when sun gazing!

@Ether Nice!

Had to find an image to go with that.

@Alex Busch That's what happens when you take the "I" out of the picture for a moment and cease looking through the filtered lens of Alex. Than consciousness is fully conscious. Awareness is fully aware. The universe is watching itself and fully awake.

@moon777light Both views are invalid. Leo never existed.

@Crystalous@TylerJ Leo is like an astronaut of inner space on a mission to a black hole. He's probably passing through Van Allen belt by now. Time no longer exists for him as all points of reference are long gone in deep space. The planet Earth is a distant memory that seems like a long gone dream. As he looks out his window he sees infinite space with countless galaxies in all directions. He sees clouds of gases forming into particles than into matter as galaxies, suns, planets and Leo's. He reaches his final destination. The black hole. The singularity. Whatever crosses the event horizon never comes back. He is absorbed into the black hole never to return! Hehe -No, Leo isn't physically traveling to a black hole and getting spaghettified. But close. His body is staying here on hold for his return. But something of Leo won't be coming back.

@tsuki When you look at a cup to examine it, you are not aware that it is the emptiness that makes the cup a cup. A cup can be destroyed so it no longer exists. But the emptiness that made the cup will always remain.

You know we make this sound a lot like rocket science or something but we all experienced this as children. Remember those special moments when reality was complete within itself. No yesterday. No tomorrow. No false image of self doing the looking. As @blazed said 'pure consciousness'. Much easier for innocent children to access. No partition of mind to get in the way.

@robdl Yes it is a balance of the two. Let me put it this way. There is no one meditating. Meditation is just happening. No doer!

Alan Watts- The Art of Contemplation All that needs to be experienced for enlightenment is already present, and anything in excess of this would be obstructive and redundant – like red ink on a rose. Otherwise, it is simply necessary to see that our usual "I" is a false and impotent image. But just as this phantom cannot actually will or do anything, it cannot get rid of itself. No tensing of muscles or, for that matter, deliberate relaxing of muscles, no repetitions of formulae, no self-suggestion, no exercises of imagination, no psychophysical regimens of any kind will do anything but add strength to the phantom. For, every littlest movement to change or to try not to change the way you actually feel now will be just one more of those futile muscular tensions (like trying to lift an airliner off the ground by straining at your seat-belt) which give semblance to the reality of the separated ego. You, considered as that ego, cannot get polar vision or cosmic consciousness. It might arise all of itself, as if by divine grace, but there is nothing, just nothing you can do or not do to bring it about. Yogis and Zen followers sometimes come to this point after long and heroic efforts. At this point there is nothing to do except what is happening of itself. All that remains is the simple awareness of what is going on – trees outside, street sounds, clock ticking, sunlight on carpet, breathing, body feelings, talking to yourself in your head. Usual cosmic jazz. That's what there is, and every bit of it, including memories and recollections, is happening now. It comes out of nothing as sounds come out of silence, for it should be obvious that the universe has always started from now and left traces behind, like a pen as it writes, though the written record, the seeming past, is still and only now. You, as ego, cannot change what you are feeling, and you cannot, effectively, try not to change it. There is simply and only what is happening, including those particular thoughts, images, and tensions which you customarily attributed to the phantom thinker and doer. They persist like echoes, but as it is seen that they are just static in the nervous system and not the work of any central ego, they lose interest, subside, and go away of themselves. Hoping that they will go away is just more static. If this becomes clear, the effort to transform one's own mind should collapse, and along with it the whole illusion that one is a separate center of consciousness to which experience happens and for which these happenings are problematic. This collapse would then become the state of contemplation, the realization that all is One. I may understand this point theoretically, but still there seems to be no change, for which reason I look for some process whereby I can move from theoretical to immediate or intuitive understanding – not recognizing that this is still a subtle form of the absurd attempt to transform the transformer, arising from the illusory distinction of thinker and thought, experiencer and experience. So long as this subtle confusion remains, one can be beguiled into various ways of trying to meditate, and a competent guru will suggest techniques so clever that their absurdity will be difficult to discover without resolute attempts to follow them through. Furthermore, the aspirations and minor successes of other seekers will compound a collective illusion, and even a mutual one-upmanship contest, of believing that this or that method or guru is, at last, the one that really works. Yet the intention of the guru himself is simply to exhaust the energy of the illusion by bringing his disciples again and again to experiences of the absurdity of trying to transform the mind with the mind. As the Zen patriarch Seng-ts'an put it: The wise person does not strive The ignorant man ties himself up… If you work on your mind with your mind How can you avoid an immense confusion?

@Viking Maybe it's coincidence but I was just listening to this video and the answer to your question is here @ 38:00. Keep a really open mind because the answer comes through a woman who claims she's been visited by higher dimensional beings. @ 48:00 it gets really interesting, the collapse of the low consciousness ways of society (money and government, ect).

'Bend like a reed in the wind' -Zen saying.

I found this great video about how the brain can be rewired to change the way we experience reality. It seems it has a lot to do with focusing the mind at an elevated level. I found this video interesting b-c when I experienced my first awakening there was a distinct shift that felt as if thought had come to a point of perfect focus or hyper focus. Hard to explain exactly but something distinctly shifted in awareness. I remember thinking to myself afterwards "Holy shit I never knew that was possible". It was as if something that had been dormant was suddenly awakened. So that's why I feel it's important to share this video with you guys. It's a bit long but well worth listening to. I'm going to start practicing "re-wiring" of the brain by putting total trust in the fact that the universe knows way more than I do and in the process dropping my old patterned views and expectations of how reality works so that the doors are wide open to all possibilities. So the question is, can we completely re-invent ourselves through our thoughts? I say, why not? For the most part I invented this "self" that I experience now. Why shouldn't I be able to re-invent it?

@Faceless That's the kind of thought that changes reality.

@Faceless That's a good thought!

@Faceless If you take 100 ppl none of them will have exactly the same experience of reality.

@MarkusSweden What have you done with the real MarkusSweden?

@Applejuice I don't do it as a game just to scare myself. No I have sleep apnea. It's the real deal. If I think about it too much before I sleep i have a hard time falling asleep just thinking about it happening. It started when I was about 40 and has only gotten worse over time. I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night gasping for air and only than do I realize that I had stopped breathing during deep sleep. For how long I wasn't breathing I have no idea. Sometimes it even causes me to have dreams that I am suffocating because, well I really am. I do have that awful cpap machine with the air pump/hoses and mask that forces air down the throat. But having that thing over my face at night makes me feel claustrophobic and also makes my ears 'pop' like when flying in a jet liner. Also I have to lay flat on my back in a corpse position and not move all night. I just can't sleep that way. The bottom line here, I hope you never develop the real thing or else it could become a reality and not just a mind game to play on yourself.

@tsuki The mother of Maya.

Truly understand know exactly what someone else is experiencing

@Nahm Yea one week in and 3 to go! He may find what he's looking for before that. We'll see.