Nahm

@Feliks912 Make a conscious choice. Like if one is to eat pizza or vegetables for example, the vegetables require the making of a conscious choice. You’re 19, but still, to allow your mind to be at ease, you could make a choice. Stay with her, or don’t. This post, is what the practices are for. Time alone would do wonders for you. There’s little to no separation from thoughts. Your emotions are on the roller coaster of reaction to thoughts, leading to beliefs that you’re somehow responsible for anyone but you. Clarity for this comes from practices. You can’t lose either btw. You could fuck this all up, and learn quicker. All is well.

@TruthSeeker47 I struggled with this, I now find relationship synonymous with relativity. Can’t work on the consciousness of others, can work on yours, and I’ll be damned, it was relative all along.

@SirImprovement Could you post the reference of this?

@Frylock Entirely subjective. ❤️ It’s up to you. Self deception is at play either way, but, subjective.

@CroMagna @Kisame In case you didn’t see it... ❤️ This could be very helpful... Two main forms of meditation are usually taught in the West, and both are beneficial for different reasons. I personally switch between these two most of the time. They are: Concentration meditation. This develops concentration, i.e. your ability to focus on one specific thing for long periods of time. A common technique is focusing on the breath. You can focus on the feeling of your belly moving as you breathe, the feeling of the air passing in and out of your nostrils with each inhale and exhale, or any other aspect of the breath, but pick something about our breath and just focus on that. Let your breath be as natural as possible. When your mind inevitably wanders, and you suddenly remember that you're supposed to be focusing on the breath, just bring your focus back. If you wish, you may count ten breaths, and each time you lose count because of mind wandering, start from the beginning again. This will give you a general sense of how good your concentration is. Mindfulness meditation. This is "meta-cognition," being aware of thoughts as thoughts, and sensations as sensations. For example, usually what happens when you think of something that made you angry (e.g. someone cut you off in traffic, or your boss was acting like a dick), you just get lost in the memory and become angry. When you properly apply mindfulness, you are aware that you are becoming angry, rather than just becoming angry. You see the angry thought arising, rather than getting lost in the thought. Then, when you see the thought as just a thought, you deliberately observe it with detachment, and (insofar as you are able) just let it go. Don't pursue trains of thought. Some thoughts will be "stickier," like anxious or angry thoughts, and will want to hang around. This is fine, simply remember to observe them with detachment and let them come and go. When you get better at concentration meditation, you can enter really peaceful, relaxed, and stereotypically "blissed out" states of awareness. This is nice, but note that it's hard to bring this state of altered consciousness to everyday life, because rarely in real life do you get the opportunity to focus on one thing exclusively for long periods of time. This sort of meditation and super-concentrated absorption existed before the Buddha's time, but wasn't a particularly reliable path to radical alterations in consciousness (i.e. enlightenment), since as I mentioned, it's difficult to replicate in everyday life. The Buddha is usually credited with formalizing the second type of meditation, mindfulness, which is also called vipassana or insight meditation. That is, insight into the nature of reality. Theoretically, mindfulness meditation is a far more reliable path to awakening than concentration meditation. When you get really good at this type of meta-cognition, and detachedly recognizing all your thoughts and perceptions as nothing more than fleeting subjective phenomena, you begin to grasp the insight that your "true self" is not the things of which you are aware, but rather the consciousness that is aware of them. On 3/29/2018 at 3:33 AM, TruthSeeker47 said: Also do any of you experience pain in your back or legs after 20 - 30 mins of meditation? and if so what helps you cope with it? Yes, this happens to everyone, and it's actually a great opportunity to apply mindfulness meditation specifically. Many awakened individuals have apparently superhuman levels of pain tolerance. There are the marathon monks of Mount Hiei, Thich Quang Duc who burned himself alive in gasoline and didn't so much as flinch, or guys like Peter Ralston who can undergo a root canal with no anesthesia as though it's nothing. The reason they're capable of such things is that they have enormous sensory clarity, in that they can distinguish between physical sensations and negative thoughts, and the constant experiential awareness that they are not the sensations and they are not the thoughts. They can disidentify from both, and watch them detachedly as nothing more than sensory phenomena. Rupert Spira always uses the metaphor of a television screen. The screen is consciousness itself, and all things that the screen shows are thoughts and sensations. But no matter how negative or painful the images that appear, they can never fundamentally change or damage the screen. When you have true insight that you are the screen, and not the screen's images, the images lose their power. Hence the pain tolerance. So what I'm saying is, when you begin getting uncomfortable or bored, meditate on the discomfort. Try to tease out the differences between the physical pain and the negative thoughts that the pain provokes, and with mindful awareness explore how they interact, congeal together, and occasionally separate. Of course, don't push it to the point of actual injury or anything, but generally speaking, if you can get into your meditative position and hold it with no issues for the first couple of minutes, it's not going to permanently damage you if you hold it for another hour.

@Kisame Excellent post.

@TruthSeeker47 Here’s another resource, might be helpful. https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/17747-nonduality-meditations/#comment-181291 Sit comfortably, spine straight, slight tight forward, head tilted slightly down, and alert, not comfy enough to be sleepy. ? I’d keep with cross legged for a while.

@SpaceCowboy Great idea. There’d be a line around the block though.

@TruthSeeker47 Thanks. I’m glad if I helped. Some people just live a bummer life, but never even try meditation or anything for their consciousness, and they Suffering through problems they’re creating. You’re on it though. Becoming conscious is rough at first, but very worthwhile. You’re gonna be great man. You’re pointed in th right direction.

@Jacobsrw Thanks. Exploration of the inner world changes the outer world. Hard to believe that could do it.

Call it a substance, superposition, God, whatever ya like, but it appears now. Papers are appearing now. “Yesterday” was not somewhere or sometime, it’s the now you’re in, now. The now is changing like a freakin constantly perfect magic trick. With the direct experience of seeing this, it’s easy and funny. Without the direct experience, it’s pretty dang hard to grasp mentally, because it seems to never miss a detail, never buffers. Quite amazing. After initial direct experience, reality does not follow the consistency. But tell that to someone who has not experienced it directly, and you sound like a fool, or a liar. What a mindfuck we’re in. (I’m in)

@NoSelfSelf If you can tell me how I can tell you that, I’ll tell you that. My gps is workin, so’s yours. ?

@spicy_pickles Congrats!!!

@Timotheus Absolutely, maybe. ?

@Jacobsrw As a “ householder” ❤️ I appreciate the guru’s oh so much, Leo, Tolle, Sadhguru, Rumi, Buddha, etc, but, these are not direct in terms of realizations. My (more) direct masters are my wife and kids. Nature, time alone, there you can get it. Then, with ‘others’, you get to see what you got, and what there must be yet to get. The more intimate, the more immediate, the more mingled the relationship to other, the deeper is what can be realized of self. A brilliant guy could write a brilliant book on The Path of The Householder. If my intuition is so, one already is. When you can see infinity in a plastic miniature toy spoon, while a six year is screaming at you that you are using the wrong spoon for that tea cup AGAIN!!!, well, that’s just delicious, no matter what you’re “eating”.

@Neo I believe I do know just what you mean and it’s freaking awesome. To piggy back that and expand a little... sometimes it’s appropriate to tell someone - hey, lighten up, nothing so serious here, this would all carry on just fine without you, no pressure to life. That’s not true though. (The carry on part) Similar, maybe to rephrasing the tree in the woods question - if you asked the projector (movie projector device) if the tree on the screen falls would it make a sound, the projector would be like “ummmmm....huh?”

@Timotheus Lovely, though psychologically bound. Superposition, God, Infinity, whatever word, IS YOU. Not a day, not history, these are still psychological and other. For example, he is ‘applying’ in assessing “Brad” and Brad’s theory’s as if Brad is other, and as if theory could be right or wrong. As if ‘his’ presence where a human alive, as if the past led to it, mistaking the un-existence of now for a culmination of something to be realized or understood, or outside of. “Connecting this and other person’s this”, reminds me of verbiage like fragmentation, movement and whole, which reveal psychological understanding & separation of awareness without direct experience. If the direct experience where ‘present’, he would be laughing to hard to finish a lot of the sentences he is saying. An enlightened master could not walk in the ‘the woods’ nor ‘hear a tree fall’. That’s impossible. God is not something which connects one’s this and another’s this. He’s God. “If you can’t even explain this, how can you explain that which goes beyond this?” - in Truth, how could he keep a straight face there? He seems aware of meaninglessness while unaware he attaches meaning to God. Of course, everything I just said here is a lie. It also brings to mind, that he would be likely to see psychadelics as a substance which cause an experience, rather than the truth that psychadelics don’t exist, other than as a punchline to a joke with a very, very long set up.

@Staples Could you post some material with specifics about the thought experiments he did?

@NoSelfSelf You have a compass, a GPS, right inside you. Align with it. If it feels bad, stop and deduce before proceeding. The world, through that trust of inner guidance, through the clarity that it is how you choose to see it - it quite beautiful. When you say “yeah, but this bullshit here - that ain’t me! THAT is you, and that’s when you pause and realize it’s how you’re looking at it. You are creating the whole damn thing, there is no assertion. The game is how you see it, not what you are seeing - and the game has been afoot since you fell out of a vagina - get going!

@pluto Hell. Yes. You reached right into me with that post. Thanks for that! - “You silly egoistical fool, i am infinite intelligence” - that! ❤️ I swear I heard Zack Dela Rocha whisper into my soul - “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”. Kick some ass today Source.

@TruthSeeker47 Have you considered an attitude of accountability for how you feel, and your outlook? Sometimes it seems like gloomy days are due to a video we watched, or something someone said, etc. But, in truth, it’s always our interpretation of what others say, and events we witness, which leave us feeling whatever way we do. I am wondering what the intricacies of your meditation practice is like. 40 minutes a day should be bringing you peace of mind and some mental space, at the least. There is a certain ‘depth’, that when reached, the actual psychological and physiological all pervading ‘substance’ of love begins to be real-I-zed. It comes from within, not without, and needs no interpretation. It is freeing, and connecting at the same time, in a most wonderful way, if you let go of perspectives. When you next sit down to meditate, make a point to be decisive - acknowledge this is your time to simply and only be you. You’ll drop all the roles (worker, student, parent, son, daughter, human, alive, etc). Commit that you will let every last aspect of everything just go. Keep relaxing every single muscle deeper and deeper all the way down to the tiny little muscles in your spine from top to bottom. Repeatedly ‘sink’ down into relaxation, and then relax more with every out breath. That is your time to be, to be yourself. When I sit to meditate every morning, I leave ‘all this’ in the most literal sense. Another way to look at this, is you can use practices like meditation etc to let it all go, to allow detachment from thoughts, reaching true peace of mind, and or, you can do positive things for yourself - exercise, clean up your eating, drop bad habits, give to others in unconditional love, donate, volunteer, help someone with anything, read an uplifting book, listen to Uber positive stuff like Abe Hicks, Tony Robbins, Mooji. Way down the road, your gonna see there is only you, and your person is a freaking miracle within a miracle made of love. So for now, consider that, and try to realize, if you’re not feeling the way you want to feel, if you’re not seeing life the way you want to - you are behind it - no one else, it has always been you behind this. There must be things you want to do but aren’t, and or things you want to stop doing, but aren’t. Make a list, and wake up, and start living your life.

Sounds like your building conceptually, unaware you’re adding a gloom & doom aspect. Practices?

@Patang right. ?

@Krishna Siva 20 minutes a day is enough to get you where you are. Do longer, deeper meditations, let the thoughts pass exactly like cars on the road, or waves on the water. A ‘space’, or separation develops from this allowing and it is a wonderful freedom. Eventually, you will not have thoughts in the way you do.