UnbornTao

Satsangs on Thursdays.

Great, keep working on it. Chances are, the recognition is just intellectual. This is a necessary first step but you have yet to become aware of it as a reality operating in your experience right now. Actually grasping that fact would instantly release you from the unnecessary suffering you're creating and enduring, at least in that domain. Rarely do we experience a state of true emotional or feeling neutrality. You may simply be insensitive to - or not paying enough attention to - your experience, or you might be feeling apathy, despair, or something of that sort. Very subtle feelings are always in the background, even when they're hard to name. Consider that positive and negative arise together. Get clear/er about what you experience. Refer to my post above. Even if there's an objective underlying physical condition, you can still use your mind in a way that helps you feel freer and lighter. You'd be surprised how much lightening up a bit, grounding yourself in the body, and taking yourself less seriously can go a long way toward creating a functional, healthy experience of life in the present.

It might be true that self is fundamentally already non-existing for everyone. How come I'm not suffering from that? If that's the case then what is it that you've been suffering as "partially being dissolved"? Consider: if no physiological malfunction is going on, where do you find your dilemma? It's possible it's just a story you're believing and suffering from. It's fucking conceptual! Stop feeding it. Be free from the story. Heal!

An interesting practice is to temporarily see one's parents as persons rather than as "mother" or "father." It takes some work and provides a different perspective.

I think you stubbornly cling to that story of self-dissolution. What happens when you stop believing in it? Set aside all the spiritual stuff you've heard about self this and self that. Also, "the future" is being conceptualized by you now, is it not? So there's no reason why you couldn't imagine a positive, hopeful one - or simply live in the present. Barring some physiological malfunction perhaps, depression can't possibility exist in relation to what's present now. So you see, just as you generate negative thoughts and feeling states, you can produce healthy and enjoyable ones.

Actually, it is easier done than said. What's needed is just learning to recognize that you are resisting your present experience, and to allow yourself to experience whatever you're going through - stress and anxiety in this case. Let them be there. From there you can become aware of what they are and how you are doing them. Getting out of one's mind is freeing and relaxing usually. It is a more present, objective, real experience. Good luck!

Start by embracing the present moment exactly as it is - do this. And stop imagining a future where something bad or unwanted might happen. Be grounded in your body, breathe from the center - this should help, too.

It's all about context:

Haha, what made you ask such a question in the first place? What makes you live happily and joyfully now?

Hope she/he is doing okay.

Wouldn't 'system' be a more accurate term for that? We could also stay grounded, since it's tempting (and easy) to extrapolate. In any case, if we agree that what you said above might be better described as a system, with the mind as its context, what exactly are you saying when you claim that the mind is a context? The space where thoughts occur? Is that how you see context? Or perhaps as the possibility for the existence of thought (since we're using 'mind' as an example of context here.)

Got it. And what does it mean that it is a context? You said words and context arise and disappear in the mind.

Nice, thank you. Your first paragraph does resonate. About your second one: just be careful not to confuse a belief with an insight. We don't need to believe in anything - especially when our experience tells a different story. It's better to leave it as an open question until one becomes personally conscious of what's actually true. I'm not clear on that yet. For now, it goes something like this: the space, possibility, or condition that determines how a thing - or a set of things- "shows up" for us. I'm also not exactly sure what "showing up" means here. Any given context brings forth sets of assumptions with it, as I currently see it. Among other things, context may give rise to a world of assumptions within a particular subject. It might actually be what allows for a group of inter-related assumptions to exist. What is it to contextualize something? An example of a profound context I've used before: the self determines how your experience is held by you - like the operating system of experience.

Thanks for that. Are you saying that the mind is a context?

I like the analogy. That seems to be going in a real direction. Implicit, yet present throughout any given event, process, or activity - perhaps in how it is interpreted. The recipient and the content. The operating system and the applications. A social setting and the subject of discussion. In a sense, we already recognize context in many situations. Yet there also seems to be a deeper aspect to it. Thanks for the context. Sounds good! "Condition of possibility for a thing to be what it is." The condition of possibility seems synonymous with 'space.' But what would the thing be in this case? Without context, wouldn't the thing simply be whatever it is in itself? Contextualizing it would provide a different way to relate to it. For example, pouring water (let's call this the 'content') onto the floor (the context) is different from pouring water into a vase, a printer, a dam, or a shoe - yet the water remains essentially the same in all those cases, does it not? Just some considerations. Take a squiggle like freytfs. Prior to applying context to it, we could claim it is what it is in and of itself - that thing (freytfs). When the context or possibility of language is added back, that nonsensical drawing can be made sense of as a 'symbol' (implying it is now being recognized as something that is "languaging," even if it doesn't make sense in any particular language). What if I told you the word was Norwegian? That would likely change how you perceive it - maybe you'd want to check its original meaning (I just made it up, by the way.) Bringing up language might be muddying the waters, I think. Where's @Water by the River? WHAT Can we change our context of living life from 'self-inversion' to 'self-expansion'?