UnbornTao

People rarely tell the truth. Don't you ever get the feeling that you're full of it sometimes? That what you're up to is often a form of intellectual pretension?

Your mind is incredibly efficient. Notice how, once you've made up your mind about something, you rarely stop to earnestly revisit the topic or your own conclusions about it. After all, in your mind, the matter has already been settled. The topic may have been transformed into a form of knowledge - accepted or rejected, neatly packaged, filed away, and now safely "resolved." This thing is what I think it is. Moving on to the next topic. Yet we often fail to recognize a crucial difference between what is "thought" on the one hand, and "reality" on the other. The concepts that we hold are not necessarily accurate reflections of reality. And maybe they make up your reality, strangely enough. Perhaps the mind instinctively avoids - or sees no reason to expend energy - re-examining things it believes are already understood.

You want things, people, and events to draw you out of yourself and your little bubble - perhaps by falling in love, taking drugs, seeking gratification, gaining approval, having your worldview confirmed, and so on. You may well depend on the "other" to feel happy, to confirm that you exist the way you want to. This ties closely to the need for validation. Deep down, you want to be acknowledged; you seek confirmation of your very existence. In other words, part of you doubts your own realness as a person. Very raw reflection.

And the Lord said, Let there be wind; and there was wind.

Fair, though I'm not sure about the quality of 3d printed books.

@CARDOZZO 💪

I was being sarcastic, to be clear.

Calm down.

Like a good follower. Well said.

And the appeal of adopting such a worldview (because it is going to be a worldview) is that you get to place yourself as the sole arbiter of truth, of course. You devil. 😈

You know, apart from Ramana, one of the greats was Adi Da, and you know what he said about the drugs in relation to becoming conscious. Actualized.org Deception Awakening? And this was a sober one! Personally verified.

I don't know about that. Hopefully it's real for you. In any case, it's very easy to deceive oneself in all kinds of ways. We seem to do that all the time. Often, thinking oneself enlightened or awakened most likely comes from a conceptual world - we just have a hard time discerning what is thought to be true from what is actually true. Something other than oneself - the truth - would have to be the arbiter of that assessment. This trips us off in part because we confuse a claim about what's believed to be true with whatever is actually the case. As for the "natural" part, not sure what to say. A psychedelic experience or a particular state may not be awakening, so that's that - if that's what you were implying by "artificial."

You guys are funny.

@Natasha Tori Maru Go for it!

Neither do you as a person, though the broader point is that these kinds of things generally distract you and obstruct a truly open investigation. It's just intellectual. They might be useful to entertain so you can learn new ideas and so on, though. Ramana advocated asking, "Who am I?" In my view, he was one of the few who really knew what he was talking about - and in a profound way. Why not do that? It seems that we so-called spiritual people tend to be full of ourselves, despite our reluctance to openly acknowledge it (primarily to ourselves), and may already think we're already deeply enlightened. Most likely BS in most cases. And if drugs and fantasy are involved… yep. Encouraging message! Just be honest with yourself (impersonal you). After all, you can't pretend your way to the truth. You can think that a belief you hold is true - as a matter of fact, we already do - but that doesn't make it true, much less existentially true.

No, it just means that what is the case has to be grasped for itself. And this is not necessarily easy. A packaged Happy Meal can be convenient, but however affirming it is, a concept or belief about existence is different from a personal encounter with the nature of things. And again, it's a tricky business. It certainly isn't resolved by adopting a cosmology.

The truth is whatever the truth is. A belief system is a belief system.

I see that what I said struck a nerve. In a certain culture such a gesture might be interpreted as a sign of love. Within that culture, we would be exchanging loving gestures, and feeling good about it. Thanks for playing.

Yeah, I can understand that. But have you tried actually doing it? I'm not saying it's necessarily easy, or mere philosophy. But why defend resisting them? Since they're already being experienced, you might as well feel them fully and let your experience be whatever it is. It's obviously also understandable to not want to experience them, since they're felt as negative and therefore unwanted. Still, it might be worth a shot. Can't transcend what is not experienced as it is. It's okay either way.

If you're a real user, hi! What is your concern, in a couple of short paragraphs, if you don't mind? What is it that you're specifically afraid of? Save yourself the stories.

Meaning?

"We wants it. We needs it." It seems to me that if the distinction is experientially made, then that should settle what is what. To be clear, I wouldn't say they're necessarily mutually exclusive or that they can't overlap. But it is possible to want something without needing it. You could test this by creating a desire for something - ideally a simple thing - that you don't need. If that's possible, the difference should become clear. One assumption we could fall into is that not needing something means that pursuing it is bound to fail - something along those lines. Yet the reason something is pursued in the first place is that, to some degree, we want that result to come about. I'd categorize desire as a weaker term - more about imagining something you want, without necessarily intending to make it real. What it feels like is being pointed to here is the possibility of generating results and creating things without needing them. Commitment is another distinction to introduce here. Being committed to something simply demands consistently taking action toward the actualization of the promise made. No need for need. This approach seems to greatly simplify how you pursue things. It helps to get yourself out of the picture, so to speak, so that what needs to be done becomes the priority - not one's own needs or wants. Perhaps this is more aligned with the aspect of non-neediness: to stop taking "yourself" so seriously all the time and instead focus on what is appropriate - or demanded - by the circumstance or event in front of you. What is appropriate is determined by the purpose of your undertaking - the reason why you took it up in the first place.

What does the sound of rain falling mean? What meaning does a sound have by itself? A sound is a sound, and the influence it has on you is different from the raw perception of it. You're overlooking the act of perception, assuming that your experience reflects reality as it is. Hear any sound prior to interpreting it. You have to do this to recognize the point - thus overriding knee-jerk reactions and impulses. For a sound to have an impact on you, it has to be interpreted and related to you and your self-concerns. For example, people do not respond the same way to the same sound, which suggests the sound itself is different from how it is experienced by different people. A slap in the face is not a communication in itself, but it sure hurts. Once again, you're speaking from within the world of language, taking it as an absolute, and failing to recognize it - or step out of it - even if only as an imaginative exercise. In other words, we could say that the sound does not give a crap about the impact it has on you. It just occurs as that. You, on the other hand, care. Can you begin to see the distinction here?

Not really - hence the "make a distinction" part. You can want (or desire) something without strictly needing it. This sounds reasonable, yes, although it would still occur within the domain of want and would therefore be different from needing the pursuit. I'm not saying the distinction in real life can't be blurry, or that want and need can't overlap or occur at the same time. Sometimes, our motivations to pursue anything may well involve both need and want, to different degrees. If it's done desperately, as you mentioned above, there might be some sort of need involved there - emotional or otherwise. But this is still different from simply wanting something to come about, so it's useful to get clear on what wanting and need each are. Generate a desire for ice cream. Now you want it. Do you need it (as in "real" necessity)? Not really. You may be bored out of your mind and thus looking for instant gratification - a distraction from your mundane state. In that case, we might say you "need" it (in the sense of emotional dependence, or addiction).