axiom

What are you? Nothing at all. There is no 'I'. Within the nothing, there is awareness. Not awareness "of" anything in particular. Just awareness. As soon as awareness kicks in, the 'I' and thus duality and the whole circus soon follows. Awareness alone can be tasted but not maintained. Maintaining "awareness of" is a noble goal.

The brand of QM which converted a group of genius physicists to mysticism in the 1920s is now coming up to 100 years old. Pretty amazing when you think about it: dream characters discovering that they're in a dream. Idealism - the key finding of QM, has often been argued against due to the small scales involved in the early experiments. Of course, many have intuited that there is no reason that scale should make any difference at all - but since the classical paradigm still strongly prevails within academic institutions, there has been much braying, dismissiveness and arguing to the contrary. Much of this may be to do with strength of character. After all, it takes significant courage to accept the total destruction of one's worldview. The temptation for the materialist is to keep ignoring or dismissing the mounting evidence. The above experiments firm up the case a little bit. Not that it should really be necessary. But in demonstrating that the same "spooky" phenomena occur at increasingly massive scales (as many already intuited would be the case), even the most stubbornly-held physicalist position will eventually become untenable.

In this context it means a hitherto unknown or unnoticed direction.

It appears that Ralson somehow believes in free will at the relative level. I don't see enlightenment there.

I’d wager that if a poll were taken of this forum’s users, there would be significant asymmetry favouring “yes” responses to the question “Have you experienced an extreme amount of trauma in your lifetime thus far?” I think trauma is pretty much the primary catalyst for pursuing a spiritual path for most people. It starts off as a coping mechanism and a distraction. Happier people don’t have as much incentive to explore these matters.

A finite form cannot encapsulate infinity. The figure of Jesus was NOT God. At least, not in the sense of being “uniquely God”; not any more than a ham sandwich is God.

I hereby bring you the latest North Korean missile test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7GSd-iOgA I mean...

For siloed consciousness (i.e. you as a human), physical pain happens whenever you push closer to the boundary of self. Pain lets you know where those boundaries are. For example, in the movie The Truman Show, Truman's emotional pain massively increased the closer he got to escaping the dome. A hand held over a flame for long enough will be maximally painful because pretty quickly it will no longer be a hand, and eventually it will burn away into nothing at all. Physical pain is only troubling to the individual, and only as long as the individual believes itself to be there. From a higher consciousness, physical pain is on the same ontological level as a chair, a table, an oak tree, or a cloud passing in the sky. It is possible to observe pain from the outside, and react to it as you might react to a cloud passing in the sky. It is within everyone's grasp to experience this phenomenon directly with strong-determination-sitting meditation (SDS). Actually, SDS can completely recalibrate your sense of what it means to suffer by enormously increasing your emotional and physical pain tolerance. In so doing, if kept up, then eventually (and inevitably) it leads to total bliss, total love, total compassion. Suicide is pointless. You'll just find yourself somewhere else, and you'll have to deal with all of this again (and again, and again). No fear, enlightenment eventually comes to everyone. EDIT: Just realised this thread goes back to 2018...

Have you ever done SDS / strong determination meditation? I think a 10-day silent meditation retreat would be a huge step in the right direction for you (and anyone else, really). It's free to do it, and there are no catches. The food they serve tends to be delicious too. You can find a list of upcoming retreats at dhamma.org.

Reassurance-seeking is a big part of what energy vampirism is, although I personally think the term itself is quite ridiculous. Really I think it's just a new-age term for borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is well-understood. Maybe check out the symptoms of this and see how many you can relate to.

In spite of these choices, it's curious that the brain tumour that eventually killed Terence McKenna was mushroom-shaped.

Lions have no colour. There is no such thing as choice.

Thank you very much.

God is the cause of these things in the same way that the ocean has tides. But it does not decide them. God has no sense of self. So when you ask "why would one ever choose..." you are making two errors: 1. You believe there is such a thing as choosing. Choosing does not exist even in human experience. 2. You believe that God must have the ability to "choose" (even if humans can't). You are extrapolating and amplifying the notion of "choice" to the celestial realm when it manifestly exists nowhere else, and never has. "Choosing" (the illusion thereof) opens a Pandora's Box of limitation, bias and finitude. It reduces the idea of God to something finite.

- Disidentification with the body such that the prospect of dying is completely unconcerning; - The realisation that you don't exist, and never have; - When your internal voice goes completely silent.

@Consilience Can you clarify if your practice is essentially Vipassana, i.e. full body scanning? Or just focusing on the breath / something else? I find the former VERY boring, although it does probably yield the best results.

What's going on here is disassociation, for the most part. When the default mode network has shut down, and you look in the mirror, you no longer see an "I". You just see a face. This allows you to look at the person in the mirror objectively. You may realise you look older, younger, more attractive or less attractive than you (previously) thought yourself to be. It will feel as if the person in the mirror is someone else.

@Preety_India I have been through extreme amounts of trauma / abuse in my life as well, starting in childhood and continuing into my 30s. Trauma is a like a hot coal. It burns anyone who carries it, and then they pass it on to someone else. Those who have wronged you have held it, were burned by it, and they passed on to you. Now you've been burned by it, and you pass it on to others. The real root cause of the problem may extend back decades, centuries, or forever. It is not your fault that you were burned by it, just as it was not the fault of those who gave it to you. Noone asked for this trauma at any step of the way. The only way to root it out is to truly forgive those who have wronged you. This is the meaning of love. Yes, it is much, much easier to say this than to actually do it. But that's the very reason trauma can stick around forever. It is the reason it gets passed on. You have the opportunity to be the person who finally stops this cycle from continuing. If you are able to recognise the ultimate truth that everyone - yourself included - deserves complete forgiveness, then you will go some way to alleviating the anger. Vipassana is an incredible tool which can ultimately root out all of your trauma and totally recalibrate your default response to triggers. The triggers themselves will ultimately lose all of their power.

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Book yourself on to a 10 day silent mediation retreat (Vipassana). By the second or third day, you will be dying to get out of there, but if you persist, and you do it with full commitment, it will be so, so worth it. It will also probably be the hardest thing you've ever done. This will increase your emotional pain tolerance significantly, and you will begin to understand the root of your anger as it evaporates. As a bonus you may have a significant awakening experience. Good luck!

I'm sorry to hear you've had issues in the past with connecting to others. I think introverts can sometimes be frightened to get into a long conversation. To connect with others you must be supportive and interested, and show it. That means striking up conversations, asking questions, telling your own relevant anecdotes and offering advice where needed, etc. It sounds like the trip taught you some of these things. It gets much easier the more you do it. You may be surprised at how quickly you improve. Good luck!

@Benton Yes, I must do more DMT, especially 5MEO. Thanks for your pointers. Past experiences on high doses of psilocybin have been absolutely terrifying in scale, so I've been putting it off. The prospect of experiencing so much love again makes me feel anxious. Not sure if I can put myself through that again.

I don't exactly agree. I think that reality is accidental, chaotic and entropic. There is no intelligence that designed it. Rather, it is happening, it has always been happening, and it is aware. I do not see limitation here. The idea of volition is a misapprehension that you're scaling up to the God level. Volition is an artefact from the perspective of a limited identity. You have experienced thoughts arising and passing, but you have never experienced volition. You postulate its existence when it has never been part of your lived reality at any level. Volition, agency, control - these are egoic constructs. To put it another way, God is its own source. It wraps around itself forever. It is the input and the output. Perpetually changing form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation. It does not possess "will".

I agree, all language is duality. It's the best we can do. If you watch how you're imagining things (i.e. you do not decide which thoughts you're going to have), then you'll realise that this is the same way God imagines things. Because you already are God, imagining. Whatever God imagines is just whatever it imagines. It does not control it. It does not will it. If that sounds like freedom, then God is free.

I agree with this (a slightly modified version of what you actually wrote). As soon as "me" or "I" comes into it, you're referencing ephemeral phenomena. I think even God is slave... infinitely recycling itself through an ourobouros / torus of infinite feedback (metaphors)