Carl-Richard

What does that mean? You awoke just once?

How many times have you tripped? How many hours have you meditated?

Haha it's like the inverse of Plato's Cave: you emerge out of the cave and get blinded by the golden Sun vs. you descend down and get blinded by the golden shine of the Earth

Or when you finally strike gold (or you're about to), you're appalled by the fact that you have to sacrifice any notion you have of yourself as famous.

Stop saying

You'd be surprised.

I'm natty brah

@Yimpa Wow ?

Awakening rocks your boat and it takes time to get stable again. And it looks different for different people. Just give him some time ;D

Based.

@Razard86 Let's assume you did the sensible thing and answered no to the question (and not the definition). Why? Is it that rape as a general activity probably doesn't help people to awaken to the truth? Is it that rape perpetrated at the hands of the guru reflects something about the guru and not the truth? Now, given that proposition, if your desire is to help people awaken to the truth, why do you need to be an asshole to do that? Does your need to be an asshole reflect something about the truth, or does it reflect something about you? Does you need to be an asshole reflect the needs of the people you're supposedly helping, or does it reflect something about you? Is the truth suddenly not the truth if it doesn't entail hurting somebody's feelings; calling them "delusional", "liar", "idiot", "stupid"; in full caps and with three exclamation marks? I don't think so. I think that to claim that these things are inextricably tied to the truth would only be a corruption of the truth, and it's highly possible to teach it in another way.

Let's define rape as something like forceful sexual intercourse without consent. Should spiritual teachers be allowed to rape people if they claim that it furthers their ability to teach?

When your preoccupation with your own needs is often at the expense of others.

Should spiritual teachers be allowed to rape people if they claim that it furthers their ability to teach?

You can erode the separation between self and other without invoking the concept of private experiences. It's in fact a non sequitur. You don't have to deny that a rock has a private experience to realize your oneness with it, so it's the same with anything else. You don't have to deny that Jupiter is a planet for you to realize oneness with it, or that flowers are red. You just have to know what these things fundamentally are, which is like you say mental constructions. And if anything, other people's experiences will only become more apparent when you actually erode the separation between self and other.

And that is why it makes zero sense to say "only you experience pain, go slap a person to prove it", as that is dealing with personal selves and not the impersonal self. Q.E.D.

It's only relatively consistent. When you notice the inconsistencies in this dream, that is when you wake up, and you'll be in an even more consistent dream.

Please slap me so hard that I die and never have to experience the pain of reading any of your posts again.

It's quite obvious actually.

There is really not. It's really only on this forum, purely a cultural artefact from Leo being edgy.

Go rate a sunset for me.

Depends where you draw the boundary.

It's not that there is some proof that somebody can give to you. People can point you in roughly the right direction, but it's hard to do with words, and they may end up sounding like a crazy person.

This is something I've mostly learned on my own but which is also in line with a concept called psychological flexibility. This actually happened to me today: I had planned to talk to a fellow student who needed help with something school-related. For some reason during the meeting, I felt a bit anxious and uncomfortable, and I felt that it made them feel the same way, and afterwards, I felt a mixture of depression and shame, which didn't seem to easily go away. The solution I've come up with is to ask myself "what is the lesson here?", write it down and commit to it, and then forgive myself. If you follow these steps properly, the emotions will quickly subside. If they don't, you probably didn't find the appropriate lesson or a lesson that you feel justifies forgiving yourself (or you just don't know how to forgive yourself generally). Anyways, we'll get to that later. So the method is simple, and if you teach yourself to do it regularly, you'll not only have an effective way of consciously processing your emotions, but you'll also fix the very cause of those emotions, something which spiritual bypassing very often doesn't do ("just let it go", "emotions are just an appearance", "nothing ultimately matters", etc.). I think there are legitimate uses for spiritual bypassing, but it should ideally be reserved for things you absolutely cannot change. Now, for the lesson in my example, I thought my feelings had to do with some negative thoughts prior to the meeting which I kind of just accepted and didn't challenge ("I'm not as well-rested as I could be, and that will impact the quality of the interaction"). I also thought it had to do with the place we were sitting and feeling like I had to lower my voice, cramming both our PCs on a tiny table and sitting awkwardly. So the lesson then became: 1. to identify negative frames and substitute them with positive frames before future meetings, and 2. try to optimize contextual factors when possible (e.g. "go to a different place where you can talk more freely and sit more comfortably"). Then, after being satisfied with the lesson, you forgive yourself for whatever that made you feel that way ("it's ok, you'll do better next time"). Often, the reason why the emotion persists and why you can't forgive yourself is because you're not attending to the problem that the emotion is trying to address (and your emotions aren't dumb: they're trying to show you something specific that you need to change; that is how they evolved). But if you're able to attend to it appropriately and you feel that this is intuitively true, you're signalling to yourself that the emotion has served its purpose, and then the emotion will most likely subside. This is more obvious for more basic emotions like anger: somebody repeatedly steps on your toe, and then anger arises to assert your need for bodily integrity and you push them out of the way. For more complex emotions, you need to be a bit more subtle when identifying a potential solution, but the mechanism is still the same: problem -> emotion arises -> solution -> emotion subsides. The method I presented above is just a tool for streamlining that process, and sometimes we need help with that, because life is indeed complex, certainly modern life. So to summarize: find the lesson behind the emotion, write it down and commit to it, and forgive yourself for whatever caused you to feel that way.

Release me