kieranperez

The atheist and theist are both wrong and are exactly the same. They both make truth claims which they are both ignorant of and have their heads too far up their own ass to admit they don't know because we live in a culture that's addicted to pretending we already know. All beliefs are false and both the theist and the atheist are still both belief systems.

No. Not really anymore. I don’t know what this has to do with anything.

People who say that are still ignorant regardless of their beliefs of the Truth. I can say “I’m god and everything is god,” but if I haven’t experienced that, I’m just as much a gullible sheep like everybody else. It’s just a belief and all mental models are false. All beliefs are false. Those people who talk a bunch of shit, I bet you never actually pursued this thing hardcore like the people who embody these truths. The Buddha never stopped. Stories of Christ and Muhammad never stopped.

You’re good man

You didn't stir anything up nor am I offended. I'm just calling it directly for what it is. You don't have to be "stirred up" to simply call out fantasy and delusion. All because someone is direct with you and doesn't pussyfoot around the matter, doesn't mean they're pissed or have their panties in a twist.

This is the part I don’t get. On what? And I know there can’t really be a set answer to that which is what’s driving me up the wall. The only thing I really wanted to master - running - I don’t really care that much about anymore. I don’t care about racing, competing, coaching other runners just to become more successful athletes (which is all the athletes I would coach would want anyways). My passion I care about and love to learn about now is nonduality and all the things that go along with it (psychology, psychedelics, reality, happiness, wisdom, philosophy, etc.) but I don’t want to be just another one of those guys that copies Leo or do the whole YouTube self help game. I don’t really know what I specifically want to master and I don’t feel like I can because I don’t have the money. It’s like that video: Where the changes you intuit you need to make require such a RADICAL realignment and you have no idea how and even what it will be. Its hard to have hope in anything when you don’t know what you want to have hope in. My life has no direction and I don’t know what direction I want it to really have because I don’t know who I am in terms of my passions, motivations, etc. anymore. I wake up everyday now and it’s almost the worst part of my day because I wake up knowing there’s nothing for anymore. I’m always touched whenever I read say The Hero’s Journey by Campbell and listen to: because it’s like “YES! THATS EXACTLY WHAT MY LIFE IS SUPPOSED TO BE & WHAT I WANT IT TO BE! RIGHT THERE!” In yet, when the video ends, I look in the mirror and I’m reminded of just how depressed I am and feel like I can’t because it feels like I don’t have the psychological resources and even psychological cognition. I can barely read a book without my concentration going all over the place and getting distracted by everything. Realizing how poor I am with money, how I have no skills to earn enough to just to go on my adventure and then come back. I’m trying so hard emotionally to try and have some sort of positive outlook and hope and try to put that into coming up with some sort of vision but I can’t. I try so hard to let go of negative thoughts in the life purpose course but when it comes to the exercise there’s just like this screaming voice of “I DONT KNOW!” In yet, when I try to calm down the only thing I feel is the voice or feeling pressing in my head about how I need to do something.

All your fantasies and ideas of how an enlightened person acts, talks, behaves is all bullshit. Ralston is authentic and very direct. These are all projections and all bullshit. a. Enlightenment, WAY more often than not, doesn’t change you. Understanding the Truth is a different endeavor than change. You can be extremely enlightened and still steal and murder people. b. Authenticity doesn’t need to conform to norms and common parlance. Ralston is so authentic and direct people overlook him. People want mystical shmystical stories of energies and shiva and deities. Ralston cuts through the stories (not to say they don’t have legitimacy) and goes straight to the matter and doesn’t play games.

Do this

What medications are currently on? I've been on more mood stabilizers, SSRI's, ADHD meds, and tranquilizer's than I care to count and have gotten off all of them. I really agree with @Leo Gura on this. This is a more fundamental problem that's not going to get fixed with medication. Most meds work tremendously well in the beginning (once they kick in after the first few weeks or so), and by beginning I mean the first month or so, and then they start wearing off and it's like your back down to baseline. Medication for these kinds of things really is just a dead-end path because you'll likely be on them for a bit and then while you talk with the psychiatrist he/she and you will likely decide "oh this isn't working let's change up the meds" and then you waste years and also money trying to find the right mix of meds. I do agree with @Charlotte somewhat where they can help calm early and even late stage cases of being suicidal but that's all... they help but they don't solve anything and quite honestly you'll get much more bang for your buck just in terms of cash and time you're putting down looking for other routes that actually go after the root cause of all of this. You'll save yourself so much more time, money, and also mental health from ditching the traditional route most people go down. In the end, it doesn't fundamentally work because they're not looking at addressing what's fundamental. I can't tell you how much I wish my parents invested in Reichian Therapy, psychedelics for therapy (good luck getting even 0.0001% of parents agreeing to do that), Shadow work, dream work, psychoanalysis, neurofeedback, etc.

I don't know how it is for you, but for me, this is all I think of as it (metaphorically speaking)

I like that too!

@EvilAngel much love to you man

“Anyone who gives you a belief system is your enemy.” - Osho

“WHAT IS THE ILLUSION?!”

That in itself is a view

@SoonHei flow states are an occasional side effect of mastery. Not mastery itself. Also, it really does take a certain kinda person psychologically or genetically to train the way some of these guys train. It’s not an accident that the work ethic of Kobe, Jordan, Lance Armstrong, even spiritual masters have such an appalling unfathomable sense of work ethic and discipline over a lot of already really disciplined hard working people. That kinda work ethic literally isn’t possible for some people. Chunk down this thing called mastery. A big problem is that people don’t look at where they are now and that their attention is spent too much on this “mastery” ideal or fantasy.

https://youtu.be/XGp1wjEkg3w

@SoonHei gonna really shed some light on this since I’ve met Mike 3 times and had the opportunity to shoot around with him at his camps some years back and talked to him: Don’t associate these players with spiritual awakening. These players are masters at their craft. I can tell you, Mike still has a lot of the same fundamental skills that he had when he played (foul shot, dribbling, foot work, etc.). These people are not calm, serene, peaceful people. I looked up to Mike literally ALL my life until the day I shot around with him. These people are more often than not: narcissistic, CRAZILY competitive to an extremely unhealthy degree, and really, just downright assholes. A lot of these guys like to glorify themselves in their work ethic and don’t want to acknowledge A LOT of their success is due to their own inherent talent (talent is real). There isn’t some nondual thing at play. This is just downright fantasy. I can tell you that right now. A lot of these players aren’t really that happy. What you’re talking about is the result of decades of mastery. When you have a work ethic like Kobe is famously known for example, there is no real need to be afraid of doing what needs to be done because you’ve done it 100000s of times. Things can get pretty effortless at times when you’ve mastered something so deeply but a lot of that is still subject to how gifted you are in that area. The fact is that it takes decades of fucking up, falling down, getting back up and gaining skills to really get to the point that you’re talking about in terms of “being in the now” in the realm of any athetic endeavor. That’s just the result of staying on the path of mastery and doing the right things to get you there. Put a Zen Master on a basketball court, tennis court, on a bike, on the starting line of running race, he/she are not going to really “be in the now” in the sense that it’s all effortless and perform well. The greatest athletes are the ones who don’t take their wins, losses, and themselves too seriously (which is extremely rare). Sport is awesome if you come at it the right way.

As some have you might’ve seen in my other posts, I’ve really been going through this deterioration of self. Motivation(s) have been crumbling and prior passions no longer make much sense to me anymore nor compel me at all. I no longer really long to master what I’ve been committed to master for the last 11 years which is running so now I really have no direction. I’m still living at home as what not with just this part time retail job I can’t stand and don’t know what else to do with my time anymore. I don’t know why but I feel this correlation between this falling away of old self and what I’m experiencing now. To be honest, I haven’t even really been meditating that much either. I don’t know why but since I’ve been asking a break from running and I’ve also been in this dead ‘I have no idea what I want other than this enlightenment thing’ and I’ve been having this “shift” in awareness or perspective (I don’t know). Everything seems so much more dreamlike. Not in some fantastical or altered sense. I’ll just look at people and the view around me at the park and I’m at and now all thoughts, emotions, “visual phenomena”, auditory sensations, bodily sensations, all seem to arise in the same “place”. There is no gap. It doesn’t even seem real. This whole notion of an “external world” doesn’t seem to make much sense anymore. There have been no “awakening experiences” keep in mind. I haven’t grasped the absolute nature of myself or anything nor have I had any experiences of such things either. Everything that comes “into” awareness no longer has any other substance than awareness itself. Like, when I look at a tree, there’s not much of a registering that it’s some physical thing. A lot these distinctions seem to just be breaking down. I don’t know what the correlation is. I feel like I’m starting to see the unreality of what I’ve always deemed to be reality. I’ve watched the videos and learned enough theory to get the conceptual background on this but still... I haven’t even been practicing...

Devils don’t want to acknowledge their own devilry.

Felt this sub forum was the correct one to honor a true creative who followed his life purpose. I’m not much of a comic book guy (nor have I really been - just never got into it) but just wanted to say RIP to a guy who truly and relentlesy followed his own bliss.

Samadhi

“Illusion tastes good.” - Adyashanti

They're not happy with themselves. People need some sort of gross external fix (drugs, friends, sex, alcohol, books, TV, internet, whatever). It's subtle but profound