LetTheNewDayBegin

It's the opposite of inquiry. It's not inquiry if you get the questions prepared for you and it's not inquiry if the answers to questions are given before you even start. Whatever method you choose to practice, please doubt it at least a little bit.

I would stay away from Byron Katie's method. It's ineffective and it will most probably lead to self-deception instead of any kind of truth.

Have you guys heard about Hypocapnia? From wikipedia: a state of reduced carbon dioxide in the blood. Hypocapnia usually results from deep or rapid breathing (...) this can cause transient dizziness, visual disturbances, and anxiety. A low partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the blood also causes alkalosis (because CO2 is acidic in solution), leading to lowered plasma calcium ions and increased nerve and muscle excitability. This explains the other common symptoms of hyperventilation —pins and needles, muscle cramps and tetany in the extremities, especially hands and feet.

@AleksM Your post is very unfocused, there's too much of everything. I've found it hard to follow.

Hi Charlotte, Shouldn't e-cigarette be the first target to give up? Best,

@Max_V Surely you don't want to deny yourself the Game of Thrones episode, right? @Hero in progress Thank you for an interesting pdf. Could you point to what should be the focus when reading it? I think the second page is quite good. Let's contemplate on some quotes, shall we? What might be that backward-flowing movement that is supposed to gather the thought? I suspect... a self-inquiry process? Will Ramana Maharshi's methods be sufficient? What else could he mean? Could that light be the Qi ? Maybe Qigong is a good method? If breath is the key... Pranayama comes to mind. The instruction to forget the heart is kind of inspiring. Until now I thought only about forgetting the body/mind. If heart is included it means that absolutely everything needs to be surrendered (or forgotten).

@Joseph Maynor Have you considered finding a middle way for all this?

Here and there people say that God is inifnite, or universe is infinite. But can we really say that universe is boundless? Does it even make sense to say that? All we can say from experience is that observations are local and we we'll never be able to see the boundary of the universe because there of a speed of light limitation. I would speculate that the universe is not 3d-flat, so by traveling in any notion of a straight line you'll actually go in circles. Note that it still wouldn't mean that the universe is infinite. Am I right or wrong? Is universe definitely infinite? Do you have your own speculations about the reality of the universe? Please tell me.

Thanks @Leo Gura I was wondering what do you mean when you say reality and that last sentence just gave me a visual image of reality being literally in one point. Hey, maybe the thing we perceive as space doesn't necessarily have any size at all? I think I get it now that the infinite nature of reality is probably fractal-like. So it may be the case that we can zoom in and zoom out forever (ad infinitum), but we still have a universe that is finite.

Thank you for your comments. I added some guidelines to myself that ought to help me through the process.

Description Let's face it. All people in the contemporary western world are addicts. Even though I don't have any serious addictions but I am sure that I have plenty of subtle ones. Unfortunately those subtle ones are completely unidentified. Assumption If I somehow expose all my addictions at once, I will be able to overcome the problem of addiction for good. Plan To make an addictions visible, I need to remove the presence of its stimulus. To make all addictions visible, I will remove the presence of all the stimuli I can think of. Execution details For half of the week, for every week from now on, whenever I am faced with a choice, I will: - choose to drink plain water - choose to eat plain food - meditate with concentration on emptiness during my meditation sessions - choose to do house chores over entertainment - during studying, choose to study things that are less exciting - choose to socially engage with people that I don't feel comfortable with I may extend this list as I observe the examples throughout the days. Please note The idea is that I don't change dramatically the way I live, it's just that I choose the less exciting and more difficult thing whenever I'm presented with a choice. Sources of addictive patterns ~ Added on 2017-07-02 11:40 ~ I've identified three sources of addictive behaviour. +------------+--------------------+-----------------------+ | Source | Reason | Effects | +------------+--------------------+-----------------------+ | Comfort | Going for relief | A short-term benefit | | Forcing | Going for success | that contributes | | Excitement | Going for pleasure | to general unhappiess | +------------+--------------------+-----------------------+ No matter which source, the effects of addictive behaviours are always the same: I feel like I've taken a shortcut and I feel kind of bad about it. For each of those three sources I will have three different recipes that will help me overcome them. Comfort - the withdrawal shortcut +---------------------+----------------------------------------------+ | | Comfort | +---------------------+----------------------------------------------+ | Change of action | Find appropriate challenges | | Change of attention | Stop withdrawing yourself into the comfort | | Change of attitude | Notice how uncomfortable is the comfort zone | +---------------------+----------------------------------------------+ Forcing - means to an end shortcut +---------------------+-------------------------+ | | Forcing | +---------------------+-------------------------+ | Change of action | Prepare appropriately | | Change of attention | Let go and feel into it | | Change of attitude | Accept failures | +---------------------+-------------------------+ Excitement - the substitution shortcut +---------------------+------------------------------------+ | | Excitement | +---------------------+------------------------------------+ | Change of action | Choose the less exciting activity | | Change of attention | Focus on the less exciting details | | Change of attitude | Slow down, take frequent pauses | +---------------------+------------------------------------+

@Leo Gura I understand your frustration. As a community of actualized.org we went quite low. But how can we lift ourselfves up? We can't just magically be very ordered and about pure content from now on... even though we want to! Could you help us Leo a little bit with this endeavor? As suggestions... Would you consider creating a calmer layout for this subforum? Something less exciting would be very good for our problem. Would you consider creating a premium course on how to create content? You are an expert on this, after all! Or would you recommend us some materials where we could learn to improve our means of communication and expression? Also... Thank you Leo for everything! We really appreciate all of it. Sorry we are so bad at showing it.

What is god? Please tell me.

Is God both good and evil then? Is God both light and darkness?

Hi @Azrael One more question, I hope you don't mind. What is your approach to entertainment? Do you sometimes seek it? Is it sometimes a subject of your attention? Has it changed at all?

@Azrael I have two questions if you don't mind. 1) Do you feel also that you've awaken in the heart? Do you feel this open compassion kindeness that mahayana buddhists describe so well? 2) How would you describe your current relationship with your thoughts? Are they always gone or almost always gone? Could you give some comparisons?

I ask because I'm looking for advice.

Hi @Shin , have you transcended any of those four bullet points?

This is logic. Forget the logic. It's no use.

Read about the buddhist breathing meditations more. Recently, I watched a lecture about Jhanas where they say that it's normal to stop feeling the breath during the meditation. You shouldn't be frustrated, just accept it and try to focus on something else, for example, on a pleasant feeling in your body. Please watch the following video to get more information:

Challenges with enlightenment The biggest challenge so far was how to trick myself into meditating. If I go meditating to pursue enligthenment, then the meditation is already flawed from the beginning. If I decide not to pursue anything with meditation, then I tend to skip meditations for longer and longer periods until I go back again to the idea of pursuing enlightenment. Recently, I found that they way to do it was to become more decisive about the meditation practice: "from now on, no matter what, I shall meditate every day". I haven't tested it for long enough to say whether this solves it or not. Obstacles to enlightenment I feel like ignorance so far is the biggest obstacle to enligthenment. I don't really know what I am doing wrong. And everybody else has different things that they're ignorant to. So there can never be a book comprehensive enough to address all possible traps and issues. What would really me, and the community in general, is some kind of methodology of how to get rid of ignorance. Some things have worked so far quite well for me, namely: open-mindedness, refraining from jumping to conclusions, radical mindfulness, surrender, applying teachings with total confidence and then dropping them. What would be your approach to this problem, @Leo Gura?

Meditation that is difficult emotionally, like contemplating your own death, is worth the effort. Meditation that is easy and leaves too much room for random thoughts, like (maybe) visualisation of becoming a buddha, is not worth the effort. Visualisation meditation seems to be in a category of concentration methods, kind of similar to Anapanasati where you focus on the breath. The key here is to find a good object of visualisation/concentration. For some it's the breath, for some it's the Buddha. It might also change with time.

There's also a great summary of his teachigs in one video, here: The Nisargadatta Ultimatum Pointers

@Shin You can't just go unprepared and hope for the best next time. Tell me, please. Why are you not ready to die? --- edit --- @Shin Maybe you are in egotic paradigm, but you've never left the absolute paradigm either. Remember that the egotic paradigm is imaginary. So don't think that you're in it because that's how you're giving it the power to control you. Instead... prepare! Get in touch with your feelings. Shine a light of attention to the darkest places in your heart. For exmaple, answer yourself: why am I not ready to die? It's ok if "ego" responds. What's important is that you're paying attention (and not running away from the problem).

@Malelekakis There are two points of view from which we can talk about enligthenment. 1. From the objective point of view (to be more precise: imaginary objective point of view; the objective reality is just a concept in our minds, but it's a very useful concept to convey some ideas)... We get enligthened when we finally stop believing in the idea of "I". This belief is like virus, it overwhelmes our minds... It needs constant reinforcement, hence the constant "stream of thoughts" that we get from it, which are completely unnecessary, repetetive and unimportant... It separates us from the reality, but it's not like we don't ever experience it! it's just that we don't pay attention to the reality most of the time, we pay attention to "I" and the stream of thoughts. That's enlightenment from an objective point of view. 2. From the subjective point of view, enligthenment is available at all times, it takes no time at all, and it's not an action to take. If we need an explanation of why we're not in it right now, we need to imagine one. You explained it beautifully in your first post so there's not much left to say.