Emerald

Great observation. I'm curious, were the hallucinations interwoven with reality seamlessly or was it a part thought/part visual phenomenon kind of experience?

This may be too personal so you don't have to answer it. But I've always been curious. Did your family move from Russia to escape the social ails (poverty, social decay, mafia, political upheaval, etc.) that resulted after the collapse of the Soviet Union? I've heard that the early 90s was pretty rocky.

Thank you. As I move further away from having a career in the arts, I start to get little cravings to paint, here and there. I really do enjoy the task of resolving a painting. I think I got disenchanted with it because I was so involved in the idea of being a successful artist as opposed to just enjoying the process of creating. And I also had a lot of unwritten rules for how I had to create and how much I should create.

I too have similar ideas like this that I like to believe, and I hope to contribute to this through my work. But it's also important to realize that this belief, while it's uplifting, may not be true and reveals a potential attachment to the anthropocentric view of the universe. It also sets happiness and fulfillment in the future, when the future never actually comes. Reality is always perfect and complete, regardless of what happens to humans. Humanity is an individual human's everything, but is not anymore significant or less significant that any other thing in existence. So, if humans evolve and self-actualize and develop toward a better world, it's perfect. If we kill ourselves and all living organisms on the planet through nuclear warfare, this is also perfect. But I certainly prefer your way. So, it's important to follow these preferences and advocate for them.

I don't have much of it photographed by I can show you a few things. But I haven't created much art since I graduated from college. It sort of lost meaning to me. Here are some animations that I made. I wanted to see how far apart I could push each frame in the series apart from one another visually and still have it read as a coherent animation. Below are some of my paintings and drawings that I happen to still have images of. In the image on top, mine is the portrait that's second from the right. It's a self portrait of me back when I was 18 and used to be a bit chubbier.

I'm glad to hear that my video and comment has been of help. So, I think the main thing, now that you're aware of your underlying beliefs around being deserving of or allowed to have attention, is to start unwiring those beliefs and exchanging them with new beliefs. And at various times throughout the day, you can question your beliefs as they come up relative to this repression. Sometimes repressions can impact other seemingly unrelated things as the aspects of the psyche are highly interconnected. So, becoming mindful of this throughout your day should be very helpful in consciously letting go of these limiting beliefs.

Haha! I just realized that the site that the post you're talking about was from was the forum I used to follow.

I'm glad to hear that you can relate. Your question on codependency and neediness reminds of an insight that I had as a result of my experiences of ego transcendence back when I was 20. I always harshly judged people who were "attention whores". Like if a person openly cried in front of people or over-dramatized to get attention or just did things to seek attention in general, I would secretly judge them very harshly. What I realized during those experiences, was that I had the same attention-seeking bone in me, only I was in resistance to it. So, if I needed attention, I would have to do other more subtle and occasionally manipulative things that fit within the range of the rules I had set for my behavior. So, I sought attention through academic success, unique style of dress, creativity, novelty, and making myself attractive where I could actually tell myself that it was okay to get a little attention. But these never satisfied that need. I was always feeling like I needed more, but was too proud. So, I starved myself of it. So, when that came flooding back to me after those experiences, I was like 'ya know what... I'm going to be an attention whore on purpose. So what if it gets on other people's nerves.' So, I did a lot of crazy, sometimes destructive, but incredibly liberating things that I had never allowed myself to do. Luckily I was in art school at the time, and I had a lot of open-minded professors. But this was only the first phase in the reintegration process for me relative to this emotion. I had to find out why I felt the need to seek attention in the first place, and become aware of everything underneath that desire. So, it may be the case that you have a general tendency toward neediness that you're repressing. Like (this is a hypothetical scenario) maybe your parents didn't give you the attention you needed as kid. As a result you were needy as a kid and got made fun of by other kids for being too clingy. Then, you decided to not be like that. But your emotions that caused you to be that way in the first place weren't resolved. You just changed the outward behavior, to save yourself from the emotional pain of rejection from your peers. But inwardly and unconsciously, there would still remain a child, dealing with the emotional needs that never got met that the now-unconscious feeling of neediness was there to help with. So, I would say that it's important to first become aware of the neediness and accept and reintegrate that. Then you can assess why the neediness is there in the first place, then you can work on reintegrating and becoming aware of that emotional need. So, in this way, you can kind of follow your emotions deeper and deeper. Thank you for checking out my channel!

I made a video about Shadow Work fairly recently. I'll post it below. But to sum it up, repression is a very active process where you have an unconscious habit of ignoring or suppressing certain traits, emotions, and aspects of reality from your awareness. These traits get relegated to the shadow which is part of the unconscious mind. This is what creates distortion, delusion, disconnection from wisdom, and a lack of clarity. So, you find the traits that you are most resistant to in others, and you find your hidden beliefs that make those traits "wrong" or bad for you to have or express. Then, you let those beliefs go. Here is the video:

I would say that it's a big problem with many men who get into pick-up. If you read a lot of comments by PUA's it has a very misogynistic sort of vibe. That's because the men who tend to get way into the ideology come from a place of lack and have come to see women as holders of their personal value. Society teaches men in many subtle and overt ways that their worth comes from whether or not women are attracted to them. And when a woman rejects them, they don't often realize that women are choosy (they assume women work like men generally do and have similar dating standards), and that a rejection doesn't mean anything about their worth. So, these types of guys, feel powerless in relation to women. And even when they become successful with women through PUA, there is still a feeling of proving their worth and maybe even feelings of revenge. Like "Haha! I conquered you now!" But these are the men that get way into the ideology, who are the most wounded of men. However, some of the techniques and mindsets are helpful. So, I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What I find is that most men that I know personally who have studied into pick-up a little bit, do so because they want to know how to approach women and be successful. They're normally kind of nerdy/shy/nice guys who want to find some techniques. Trickery is not their plan. Nor is it necessarily to have tons of partners. They just want some form of success. Approaching is uncomfortable and there is no clear, socially acceptable mating ritual that is widely adopted due to living in the post-modern era. You either approach and risk looking like a creeper and being rejected or you don't approach and stay lonely. It can be an emotional experience, I'm sure. So, having a guide-map is helpful. A few years prior to meeting me, my husband actually read a few books on pick-up artistry as he always had approach anxiety and didn't really know what women were generally attracted to. The things that men are attracted to are posted everywhere, but women's desires much less so. So, he always felt that he was riding blind when it came to dating. But because he studied into pick-up a little bit and understood things about what women generally like, he was amazing on our first date. Just head and shoulders above other guys. Not because he was being disingenuous... in fact I think that he told me that night that he studied pick up artistry. He was just using the techniques to make himself better at approaching, dating, and being attractive.

Unfortunately, people are going to be how they're going to be. So, in one sense you just have to let go. A family member of mine, who used to not be racist until two months ago, since the U.S. presidential election, is reading a lot of propaganda on the right like Infowars and Breitbart News and other far right sites. So, in the past two months (and never before) she's all about "Islam is a front for terrorism", Muslims are bad distorted people, Barrack Obama is a radical Muslim from Kenya named Barry Sorento, we need for our police officers to be able to interrogate people who are Muslim on the basis of them being Muslim, black people have privilege over white people, we need to build a wall, illegal immigrants are criminals, etc. It's been a real shock for me, and when I point out fallacies in her thinking, she criticizes me for being politically uninformed and closed minded. It's really scary because it makes me wonder how many others have been hemmed into this type of thinking, who weren't that way before. Brainwashing is scary. But if you want to try to push your dad in a better direction, you have to meet him where he is and accept him how he is. Don't disapprove of him in a blunt way, as this will make him cling tighter to his beliefs. So, you have to find sources that are slight improvements on his way of thinking. He's not going to be able to jump paradigms that quickly, barring some huge awakening. Leo's videos and others in the rational/scientific and the post rational/spiritual paradigms aren't going to resonate with him. They're a complete mismatch to him right now. But you know the general direction that the Graves model moves in, so you'll want to maybe find more positive Absolutist-minded people for him to listen to. This may soften him up a bit more, or it may not. If this softens him a bit, you can start finding people who are mostly Absolutist but maybe have a dash of scientific/rationalism to their ideology. But Absolutists are very difficult to get them to grow, because they tend to like the status quo and their beliefs in right and wrong. Absolutist ideas and beliefs hide a lot of pain, so they need to keep believing them so they can keep targeting the hatred outward and away from themselves.

Oh... and also (I forgot to put this in my last message) when it comes to letting go of this mission to keep your mom happy, you'll want to try to let go of those beliefs. So, if that thought comes into your mind, you should actively question its validity from all angles. Then allow it to be there, but don't pay it much attention. It too, is another paper tiger. But I wouldn't get into this right now. If I were you, I would take a break for at least a week or two before doing any mental or spiritual contemplations. But when you feel sufficiently grounded, you can come back to this issues and systematically become aware of, question, observes, and let go of unhelpful beliefs.

You could give meditation a break for a few days. But if you want to continue with meditation to remain consistent, I recommend doing body scan meditations. This will help you ground your awareness more in your physical experience. It seems to me that you've gotten to a place where your mental experience is becoming difficult to control, so you want to starve that of attention and energy for a while. There is a saying (very clumsily paraphrased) "Thoughts are like paper tigers, they seem real and scary. But they can't harm you and if you don't feed them, they die a natural death." Give yourself some rest and allow yourself to heal from your fever. And get out in nature a bit. There is a process called Earthing where you walk barefoot on the ground to balance your charge out. The idea is that daily life and getting caught up with the mental life (and being around technology, radio signals, etc.) produces a lot of positive ions in a person's electrical field. So, because the ground has negative ions, this helps ground you and balance out the charge by pairing off the positive ions with negative ions. So, you're essentially grounding yourself in the same way that you may ground any other conductor of electricity. This is helpful in modern societies because most people never go outside with their shoes off, when in the past it was more common to walk barefoot from time to time.

I plan to do some videos about this coming up on grounding, spiritual bypassing, and Kundalini Syndrome. It's been a really strong theme in my life recently.

It's odd. Kundalini stuff keeps coming up more and more in my own life and with others on this forum in the past few weeks. Also, things about grounding. It sounds to me that you may have been having a touch of Kundalini Syndrome. I recommend not taking too much stock in imperatives to appease the Kundalini. If you don't want to do something, don't do it. There's no need to excommunicate yourself from your mother, if you don't want to. As long as your attachment to her is normal and healthy, there is no problem. I also recommend grounding. Focus more on the bottom chakras first to create stability. So, give spirituality a break, take a break from entheogens, eat root vegetables that grow under the ground, you might try some grounding stones like Black Tourmaline, Hematite, or Red Jasper, walk on the Earth barefoot, do body scan meditations, etc. It's very important to ground yourself now, as these visions may be delusions. My husband's sister is now experiencing psychosis which first brandished itself as an awakening. Your post reminds me of how she was talking after her awakening but prior to her psychotic break. I would pull back for a while.

I don't think Tyler represents the true self. Essentially, the story of fight club is the story of an average man who is trapped in the social system of modern America with all its accoutrements (IKEA furniture, luxury aparment, sofa, etc.). His only outlet of escape from the social system was going to the support meetings where he found vulnerable people of whom many were on the verge of death and thus able to slough off the falsity of the social system from which he felt so imprisoned. Then Marla showed up and ruined that. This caused him to create a projection/delusion of his Shadow (Tyler represents the Shadow) to come up, which brought him into a new exciting way of being and they together created a new social system, that the main character initially saw as an improvement on the old. It was more free, more primal, and less pretentious. But after the honeymoon was over, he was once again trapped in the social system which he and Tyler created. He was just as much, if not more trapped by that social system. So, I see fight club as a cautionary tale about buying into social systems or anti-social systems. Also, it has a good correlation to the spiritual ego. You think you're improving but you're not. The internal must change... the external doesn't matter that much. The main character created the new system to feel free, yet freedom was not found in the new system. The change had to occur within. As for the last part of the movie, I'm not sure if the main character realized this or not. It's debatable.

You're welcome. It's definitely important to take time for grounding. If you're too obsessed with enlightenment and other spiritual/intellectual things, this can cause things like depersonalization, feeling like reality is insubstantial, feeling disconnected from the body, spiritual bypassing, less energy, and feeling out of place or invalid in some way. On the more extreme end, it could result in delusions and psychosis. So, something like Reiki could help. But sometimes, taking a break from spiritual thinking throughout the day, may be even better. Eat heavy meals with root vegetables and protein. Take time to become mindful of your experience of reality separate from your mental life. Develop yourself in practical ways that effect your material existence here on Earth.

@Leo Gura Thank you!

There are two components to this, that I can identify. One is the physical emotional charge that has a physiological effect on the central nervous system. The other is the adoption of particular mindsets in order to avoid or repress away the possibility of experiencing the same trauma over again. Often times, this backfires and makes a person continuously relive a trauma in their mind, while never being able to reconcile it. So, these both often compound one another to sustain a trauma. Sometimes there's only one or the other, but most of the time there is both.

My husband and I were talking about this the other day, and he was telling me how he used to do it when he was dating. So, if he asked a woman out, he would say something like "Hey, I've got this one. But next time we go out we'll split." That way, he's honoring and showing that he's aware of the social expectation of paying for a person you invite out somewhere (and the traditional gesture of the man paying- because that's still an expectation of the dating world) and is capable of paying. But he also isn't opening the door to having the woman expect that he pays every single time, as this is unnecessary. Or if he bought a woman a drink, he would specify "this round's on me. Maybe you'll get the next one." What I've found is that, if you find a woman who's interested in you, you won't really have to worry about her expecting so much from you financially. This is especially true since you're so young, and most women your age are looking for fun but not really money. I see that as being more of a problem that pops up after people have established careers in the later 20s and 30s. Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but this has always been my perception. Bottom line, if she's not genuinely interested in you simply for your company, then don't go there. And you'll be able to tell if you're honest with yourself. I've had two major relationships in my life, and I've found that a real relationship once it gets serious, you just sort of naturally pool your money together and there's not really a major emphasis on the distinction between my money vs their money. So, as long as you and your partner are making about the same amount of money and you have similar ethos regarding money, there probably won't be an unfairness issue. But on a different note, it would be rather duplicitous for a woman who identifies as a Feminist to expect men to adhere to traditional gender norms while allowing women to buck traditional gender norms, if they want to. I'm sure this happens, as there are dumb people in the Feminist movement, just as anywhere else. But I find that many schools of thought in Feminism actually addresses issues where men are shamed for not matching up to traditional masculine standards. Feminism is actually quite a diverse ideology. So, you can find Feminists who are really radical and believe that men and women shouldn't even co-exist together, and are very black and white in their thinking. Then you can find Feminists who recognize the gray areas of gender issues who see men's issues and women's issues as two interdependent sets of issues. But there are still gender expectations in the dating world. There probably always will be. It's just sort of par for the course. For example, if I go out on a first date with a man and he doesn't offer to pay, this is a red flag. Not because I think men should always pay or because I'm interested in him for his money. But because it could be a sign that he's unaware of social expectations or is unable to support himself. Maybe he's a Feminist who's all about equality of the sexes... but maybe he's just cheap and socially inept. But it also may be a red flag to him if I don't shave my legs and wear make-up for the date. Maybe I'm just not into that because I'm a Feminist who feels women shouldn't be obligated to engage in beauty regimes... or maybe I'm just a slob who doesn't care about the impression that I leave. But these are really only problems of the first month or so of a relationship. If a woman still expects a man to pay every time three months into the relationship, it would be just as crappy as if a man expected a woman to be all dolled up at all times of the day three months into the relationship. There's a natural period of relaxation into a relationship that occurs about two or three months in.

You can look around on different articles and videos online. This has been very helpful for me. But if you want to learn a TON about chakras and how the whole system works, I recommend the book "Wheels of Life" by Anodea Judith. Not only will this give you a ton of information about chakras, it will also help you put certain spiritual paths and esoteric understandings in perspective. It has really helped me connect some dots.

Well, from my understanding, you want to make sure that you're grounded in the lower chakras first before attempting anything with the upper chakras. Sort of like, you don't want to start building when you haven't set your foundation. However, if a person has a decent foundation and simply has a blockage in the upper chakras, it is okay to start working on just the area where there is a blockage. But also it's important to be mindful and to do grounding work as necessary, so that a person doesn't experience emotional and mental complications. That's why I mentioned it to NutellaTC afterward, just to be sure. Think about the body as though it were a tree. The deeper the roots grow into the ground the higher the branches can grow, and the more nutrient dense and plenty the fruits come to be.

You're welcome. Also, I wanted to mention that after you unblock your upper chakras you may need to do some grounding, as well. That way, you keep balance between the lower and upper chakras. If you start to feel ungrounded or too disconnected/abstract after you unblock your upper chakras, you can balance out by walking barefoot on the Earth, eating vegetables that grow under the ground (like Carrots, Beets, Turnips, etc.), eating food that is red in color (like Beets, Radishes, etc.), doing body scan meditations, stones (like Black Tourmaline, Tiger Iron, etc.), exercise (Hatha Yoga, etc.), essential oils (Patchouli, Sandalwood, etc.), and focusing toward material/mundane things while taking a break from spiritual/intellectual things.

You can try placing stones like Crystal Quarts (Crown) and Amethyst (Third Eye) close to those chakras or even sleeping with them under your pillow. Also, essential oils like Sage (Crown), Lavender (Third Eye), Peppermint (Throat), and Rosewood (Heart) are good. You can dilute them, and either rub a small amount on your skin near those chakras or you can put them in a diffuser or a glass spray bottle and disperse them into the air. Be sure that the essential oils are high quality and pure though. And only use spring water or minimally chemically filtered water for the mix. You can also try fasting for a short period of time as this is said to help unblock and open the Crown Chakra and the Third Eye Chakra. If you don't want to fast, you may instead try eating fruits with bluish or purple color to them, such as blueberries and blackberries. Water is said to be very helpful as well. Also, the Crown Chakra is associated with the color Violet. Blue is also related to the upper chakras. With all of these things, you want to introduce these things gradually as you don't want to overdo it. There are cases where people have gone overboard with Kundalini meditation and other such practices like Quigong, and ended up experiencing serious psychological and physiological problems. So, I would start perhaps with the stones or essential oils first, and see how it works out for you.

You're welcome and thank you!