softlyblossoming

@catcat69123 Oh exciting

So beautifully put. Sounds like a life lived well, @Whatever

@catcat69123 Thank you for being so supportive of my 'insight'! I was worried you would think it's dumb because of your video on anhedonia. Do you think that maybe this is a good kind of anhedonia?

@catcat69123 I have been treating all happiness/goodness/love as suffering and the perpetuation of suffering, and freedom from suffering as a lie. This attitude has helped me stay a little bit more cold-hearted and ruthless when I meditate (as awful as that sounds). It makes it easier to disregard pleasant thoughts and feelings that are very distracting/tempting to think about, and it makes unpleasant thoughts and feelings (when they do come up) a little bit less of a surprise. By knowing to expect only suffering from sitting, it can't hurt me and make me lose my grip on reality quite so easily, which really helps me stay in control of my mind during the more intense highs and lows. It's like a big mental callous. It's the best tool in my handy dandy little box of dukkha prevention and cure. I'm not sure if this counts as an insight, but it is something I've been treating as true for a less stressy meditation practice. That's so beautiful . It sounds like something I'd be really easily overwhelmed by feeling.

Thanks, @ChrisZoZo.

Dam that made me think lol. Yeah, that's a really cool pointer, wow.

Is the absolute pure delusion?

@Tyler Durden From what I've heard, it's what you see when you look anywhere else or at anything else: an appearance obscuring Non-Duality/Nothing-Everything. I'm not speaking from experience myself, but I've listened to a few non-duality talks and I think I can communicate the gist of a non-dual answer to your question. The experience you describe never actually happened — and when it did, you were not looking at the night sky, because there was no night sky to look at or you to be looking at it — because there is nothing here to any of this. Every moment is actually the exact same, it never came from a past and is not going into a future, and it isn't even really "happening now." Even the present moment is just another concept held painfully by our ego. All the ego ever does is try to hold onto nothing by inventing stories and objects. The appearance of the night sky is given all of its reality, all of its existence as anything rather than nothing, by you. Without you, there is no night sky. What you were perceiving as the night sky was an appearance that only exists because you, the ego, want it to. Whilst at first the material world seems like something outside of our sphere of control, deep down, things only exist because we ourselves are willing/thinking/imagining them into being in an incessant attempt to survive. Survival here, can be defined as seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, and it is all that you and I ever do. Another way of saying this message is: what you experienced as looking up at the night sky was merely a thought of looking up at the night sky that was overlaying/obscuring the truth of that situation, which was and is always nothing at all. As awkward as it sounds when written or spoken, what you actually saw was what you actually never see, which is always the same, regardless of where you direct your gaze or when you look. Objects on our desk, events that happen, and anything else, just don't exist in the way we think, nor any way we could think, that they do. Worse still is that true nothing is not and cannot be something we ever get to experience. When 'you' experience nothing, there will be no 'you' to experience nothing, and so the experience will happen to no one, will not be an experience, and will never have happened. As with every unenlightenment experience, the enlightenment experience, when it ends, will be merely another concept for the ego to hold up in a painful effort to escape its constant pain, and in so doing inadvertently perpetuate the pain there-after. The ego only perceives its own creations, it is a label maker, a describer, and a suffering-machine. The ego cannot know the face of God, and it never did and never will, because when you are enlightened, there is no 'you' to be enlightened. To sum up, from the perspective of non-duality as I've come to an intellectual understanding of it: the surface appearance of the night sky was the entire thing. That's it. It could be a very disappointing answer.

I like that one. I agree, short and simple and makes sense as to what it'd be like. Sorry for messing with you a bit earlier @ChrisZoZo, pretty sure when Nahm said, he just meant for you to view the definitions for the mental projection that they were (because everything we perceive — words, definitions, inanimate objects, etc — is a mental projection that we are playing an active role in the creation of), and that this way of viewing (objects as illusory projections and not real things that can hurt us) was the path to enlightenment. @Nahm Please correct me if I'm wrong.

@Khan 0 Do you mind if I ask what technique you used to stop your own creative maniac of an ego? I'm doing self inquiry. The most brutal part of it is noticing how every action I take is dukkha and the perpetuation of dukkha, but I am starting to get how the hopelessness in seeking may lead to the end of the seeking behavior.

@Mason Riggle That's crazy!! Like an Eckhart Tolle sudden awakening? I've been pushing myself hard to silence all thoughts (false answers — every answer — to my question "Who am I?"). Fortunately, I'm finally just starting to get the hang of taking breaks whilst some of the inquiry fire is kept alight, so I don't have to go back and re-experience the more difficult starting part of the process every time I return to formally practicing with everything I have. Would you say that you need to be, to at least some degree, 'dead inside'/'emotionally numb' to see this thing through to full enlightenment?

@Whatever I don't know if you're talking about something else, but if you're talking about how everything I do is a painful attempt to acquire an imaginary future happiness that I never can, that's so spot on. We really are the butt of this lifelong joke, huh. Worse still is I can't stop hoping for an equanimous 'other-side' once I'm good enough at meditation and spirituality, which itself is a form of seeking relief in an imaginary future that's preventing me from progressing to an actual equanimous future. FFS!!! haha

Actually, in a sense, yeah. In my view the most important facet of spirituality (consciousness development) is being clear on what you want. If you want to stay up late, do so... but if you simultaneously want to go to sleep early but also procrastinate and stay up late, this will result in suffering and contraction -- contraction which can be alleviated by being clear on desires. Creating (art; music; writing; etc) seems to be associated a bit with desires becoming more clear. Mindfulness in daily life + doing what you enjoy seems to be a no brainer, but that's not like an authoritative prescription or anything. @The0Self Thanks. It's great getting so many people's confirmation on this, plus I'm starting to see how the explanations sorta interconnect which is cool. Should and shouldn't comes from the conditioned mind. If you think that you shouldn't be staying up late you can inquire into the thought like this. 1. "I shouldn't be staying up late" 2. Is this true? Why shouldn't I stay up late? 3. Because I should go up early and I'll be tired if I stay up all night. 4. Question those statements. Are they true? 5. Do I need to go up early? 6. Yes I have work tomorrow. 7. Is there something wrong with being tired? 8. No, but I don't like being tired at work. I don't perform as well when I'm tired. 9. So if I dont want to be tired at work I also want to go to bed early. Just an example but you conclude what you want rather than what you should or shouldn't do. Thanks for such a straightforward and information dense reply, @WelcometoReality. I'll give this a spin when it gets late tonight

@Ramu Cosplay, a portmanteau of "costume play", is an activity and performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. —Wikipedia - Cosplay So because the ego isn't real, the situation is that God/The Absolute, or that which is real, is merely representing or pretending or playing the role of the ego by adorning our costume (thoughts and feelings) and acting as if we are real (real problems, real relationships, real forum, etc).

@Khan 0 @roopepa Wonderful, thank you both so much.

@Tristan12 Thank you for sharing, this is relatable.

@Bob Seeker I know you weren't asking me, but I don't think anyone would choose suicide because we could still read spirituality books and practice spirituality in prison. So even in such an unfortunate circumstance, we would still have plenty of free time and hopefully a few information sources with which to obsess over our little hobby. I hope this reply gave you dopamine. May you seek well, friend.

@Mahyar Thank you for sharing such a radical perspective openly with all of us on the forum. All I can say is that I wish I had the self-control for the path you suggest. It’s actually a very good question to ask. It’s a bit tricky and hard to explain. But when you meditate and your consciousness wants to expand, the sense of excitement that you get from the experiences, the similar feeling that you get excited to share your psychedelic trip and try to describe it, actually blocks you and then contracts the consciousness. It’s very subtle. The reason I’m sharing it ? … well if there is any other person suffering from the same thing that I’m suffering, can read this and benefit. Because it’s so subtle, you actually need to put this idea into experimentation and see how helpful it can be in practice. In theory it makes no sense. Thank you, I think you put it in better wording than I could. That's exactly right. And I am becoming conscious of this game of ego and it somehow annoys myself. I do tho love to share some tips but it takes mastery, as you said, to find that fine line. I have just started reading and posting in this forum and I am hoping that by engaging more, I can gain that level of mastery. Because I think it would be too rash to say no advice at all, while we know there are people who can indeed benefit from our advice. But mastering it is a whole new field. @Mahyar @Salvijus I relate to what you all are saying so much. I want to stop talking out of my ass so much because it's so dangerous and unfortunate to give a bad piece of advice if someone runs with it. @roopepa Owie owie stop that!!!

Any tips to make the spiritual path less painful without increasing its duration? If I project good feelings onto the action of noticing my expectations, is that a help or a hindrance to getting to the final enlightenment? Or if it doesn't matter either way, then does that mean there is no reason to suffer for the sake of final enlightenment? Thank you, @Khan 0, and I apologize in advance if my questions are misguided.

@Mason Riggle Thanks, this clears things up a bit.

@Mason Riggle Can I relax?

@Mason Riggle Is dwelling in Being the same thing as moving attention to awareness and then noticing awareness is watching you, like a kind of empty mirror / empty witness phenomenon?

@The0Self Thank you. This answered my question satisfactorily. I will strive on with diligence.

@Leo Gura What do you think of my distinction-making? Perception is the empty awareness. I Am is an object for the illusory self, appearing in empty awareness, to concentrate on during self-inquiry. If we notice we are perception noticing I Am instead of "I am noticing perception," it does a neat flip and inverts. After we've inverted ourselves once, should we solidify I Am as a concentration object and use this as a launching pad with which to perform the switch, or just continue asking "Who Am I?" as before? Once we've developed the ability to make the switch on command, should we remain as illusory self or empty subjectivity to make progress? And what should we do in the inverted 'witness' state?

@The0Self When I have a lot of concentration on I Am, I can pull a 180 where no longer am I myself noticing noticing, but noticing noticing myself. In the best story I can spin, we might say that "I am the empty noticing of I Am, no longer the I Am in the empty noticing." Should I repeat this or just disregard as story?