Gigsi

Does anyone here actually understand why extreme suffering is justified? I’ve met people whose life was just complete anxiety, fear, judgement, abuse - every single day thinking about giving up, and this went on for years and years. My own life so far has been more stress and anxiety than bliss and love. Not even bliss - just calmness and peace would be enough, but I haven’t found it even though I’ve been searching for years already. I’m sure I’ll get the answer “well that means you didn’t search enough” haha, but anyway. I get what you’re saying OP. When stress, pain and suffering go on for years, and if there’s some energy or being or cosmic consciousness imagining all this thinking “oh this is great, that’s what it should be” - without some extremely huge awakening of why such complete suffering makes sense, it seems like this supreme god being could have been a little bit more loving. And yes, loving from a human perspective, because we ARE human and this suffering, whether it’s illusion or whatever you want to call it, feels as real as it gets. And honestly, most of these answers that say “god is love” or “reality is love” - sorry but it sounds like coping more than words from someone who’s really saying this from their real feelings and direct experience.

So I just had this insight while on THCa CBD mix, that completely reframed how I understand yoga. Basically, yoga is like a workout for your inner attention - that part of you that’s awareness, concentration, body sense. It’s like a muscle in some ways, but there’s a key difference. When a physical muscle goes unused, it just stays undeveloped. But this inner part? It stays undeveloped AND it’s chaotic on top of that. Your attention just goes crazy, can’t stay still at all. What yoga actually does is train this other side of our experience - the non-physical side - little by little. Over time it gets more activated and starts becoming more dominant than the “I am body” identification. You shift more into the “witness” part, which is tuned into what consciousness is actually experiencing right now, not speculation or mental noise. And looking around my body right now with this perspective, I finally get what the energy body is. You can sense your legs, organs, whatever, through something that isn’t physical. That’s your energy body being perceived by awareness. My mistake with yoga: I was jumping straight into complex practices without realizing I needed to start small. It’s genuinely hard to immediately control your awareness, breath, posture, and simultaneously do all these things - moving attention around while chanting, hitting certain patterns for 15-20 minutes. Of course you can’t do it as a beginner. You get frustrated because you don’t see meaning in it or what should happen, because you can’t even perceive that side of yourself yet. Your mind just keeps talking about what it thinks is happening. Better approach: Start with small steps. First, just learn to watch your spine with awareness. No chakra centers or chakra theory yet. I think the main chakra centers that people focus on are actually just the ones that naturally have a strong pull - your awareness senses them more strongly for certain reasons. Like right now I can very strongly sense my groin and forehead. So instead of forcing yourself through all the chakras with attention, just teach yourself to even sense them first. Then maybe later you start imagining your breath going into them. Then maybe in the future you combine the various things your teacher shows you and you actually manage to do it properly, and you get some type of consciousness state change. Which honestly is easy to understand even from normal experience - if you breathe slower, it gives you a less activated state, you relax and slow down, even your mind slows. Random thought on psychedelics: I’d imagine this type of evolution happens in humans naturally but at a much slower speed unless you work at it like a workout. Psychedelics probably stress these functions by numbing or over-activating parts of our experience, or even activating things we haven’t reached through our own observation yet. So when the psychedelic interacts with these systems, we still get some type of answer in our experience - whether we’re completely lost or gradually matching what the full potential state would be. Anyway, just wanted to share this realization. The key thing is recognizing that this is actual training of a real capacity, not just ritual or belief.

@Leo Gura I keep hearing from you recommending kriya yoga leo, could you please explain kind of what your session consists of? I have done inner engineering course and followed it for some months, but the kind of rules it had given for when and how to do kriya made me feel i was giving myself too much things to manage and was always overwhelmed which made me drop it. I imagine you recommend only breathing practice yes?

Sometimes when I’m in the middle of normal everyday stuff, working, cleaning, doing random chores, I suddenly get this strong feeling of alienationn. It’s like my attention drops the practical situation completely and all that’s left is this question: how is any of this possible at all? It doesn’t feel like panic or dissociation. It’s more like reality becomes too exposed. The fact that there is experience happening at all becomes the main thing. I’m just here, perception is here, this whole situation is here, and that alone feels strange and overwhelming. In those moments it also feels like this is all there is. And if that’s true then whatever people call God or infinity or meaning must already be here too, not somewhere else. But that thought doesn’t even stay long. What really takes over is this constant how is this possible. Like the mind keeps hitting something it can’t understand or get behind. No insight, no conclusion, just being stuck with the raw fact of existence. I’m not sure how to frame this or what to do with it. I’m curious if others experience something similar or have thoughts on what this points to.

Do you mean this as a universal truth that anyone can directly realize with enough consciousness work, or is it simply how your awakening revealed itself? How can i tell the difference between a universal insight and my mind’s interpretation of its own realization? Also, something I keep hearing, my girlfriend and many spiritual people seem to demonize anything that comes from “the mind”. But if, as you say, Mind is reality, I find it hard to see what’s truly outside of mind, or if that distinction even matters. How do you see this?