Carl-Richard

Is that really impossible though?

Spirituality is the practice of adopting a spiritual ego and then deconstructing it. If you are aware of this process, you will save yourself a lot of self-deception. You will also be more accepting and less reactive (less egoic) about the spiritual process. This also means that all tools, be it intellect or feeling, are accepted and not neglected, as they are seen as an inevitable part of the process and also that it must all be let go off in the end. To react strongly to these things is ego. Accepting them and eventually letting them go avoids excessive and self-referential/meta ego (which is the messy kind).

@all Do you guys still not understand that you have to give up everything? It's so simple it's tragicomical.

Stereotypically "religious" people are as stupid as stereotypically New Age spiritual/religious people. And this forum is New Age. That is not to say stereotypically New Age — that's of course reserved to the "nothing but" (which is a fallacy; they also tend to engage in "legitimate" spiritual practices) crystal healing, spirit channeling, Tarot reading, charka cleansing, feelgood, grounding, Burning Man, natural living people. But still, this forum is New Age. Also, separating spirituality from religion conceptually in a way that is not trivial is hard. Chances are, if you find somebody you look up to who classifies themselves as religious, and even somebody who favors specific denominations (my favorite example is Rupert Sheldrake, but my bachelor advisor was the same), you will quickly not want to categorize all religious people under the stereotypically "religious" label. You will notice that the term is so wide that it could include almost anything, and that those you find "stupid" are stupid for other reasons, and often systematic ones: dogmatism, closemindedness, single-mindedness, lack of pluralism, lack of multi-perspectivalism, rigidity.

Again, (severe) dimwits don't do spiritual practice, don't pursue spiritual traditions, don't do spirituality. The intellect is a tool, just like intuition, feeling, heart, that can be used by the ego, or by God. Enlightened beings, the ones who like to use their intellect, tend to have massive intellects.

A.k.a. intellect is useful for spiritual practice. And if you were a dimwit, you wouldn't make this subtle distinction between practicing and dropping the practice. The act of meditating itself is the biggest game of 4D Chess, partly because you have to deconstruct the intellect itself, partly because meditation is meant to be effortless but you're also seemingly making an effort. But having a duller intellect doesn't help with that. You also have to deconstruct the dull intellect, and that's a task when you're essentially dealing with an unruly mule on top of having to deconstruct it. Being a worse Chess player, again, just means you have to rely more on intuition, karma, and luck, as in cases like Nisargadatta Maharaj @UnbornTao. Yes, it's indeed possible to awaken spontaneously without any practice, without any insight or knowledge virtually into anything. But if you don't want to be a literal leaf blowing in the wind, you should not create a blockage against using your intellect. You cannot afford shooting yourself in the foot the very least bit. You're incredibly privileged to have a mind that doesn't just break into nonsense when it encounters a slightly difficult problem.

Notice that people who are intellectually disabled do not engage in spiritual practices. Where does intellect stop being important?

Spiritual practice happens in the relative. Logic, distinctions, happens in the relative. If you're a dimwit, you will struggle with those things, unless your intuition and karma carries you. If you're a person living in a world that otherwise requires you to be intellectual (the West) and you're also advanced spiritually, it's expected that you will be above average in intellect.

If you're unable to make fine distinctions or use logic, that certainly doesn't help you, with anything, except being a dimwit.

Being "spiritual" is easy when will, environment and circumstance are aligned.

It usually follows.

If I had access to nuclear launch codes, the first thing that would make me pull the trigger is people saying being intellectual is a problem.

And that's not a problem.

You're describing kataphatic vs apophatic theology.

A type of metal water pistol. You could probably use them relatively successfully if you started using them when your ears were already pretty clean and you use them regularly. I think it becomes problematic if you use them to clean a blocked ear. When I looked inside myself there were loads of black and compressed wax, pressed tightly against my eardrum.

💯

I will watch.

Tl;dr ples

Forming the intention to sit in meditation, focus on an object and let go of distractions, is arguably just as deep as forming the intention to dissolve the distractions themselves. But even if it is deeper, again, teachings, practices, are like going to war. You are already making a huge mess. But that's ok. Because you are constantly making a mess. You're just creating a direction in that mess. The difference between spirituality and normal life, meditation and non-meditation, is simply an intention and a direction. Nothing feeds the ego more than forming the intention itself, spirituality itself. And if you don't address that, i.e. letting go of the search itself, you will easily go in circles. You can pretend like you don't need to address it, but then it will either be addressed on accident, in the form of a spontaneous insight "oh yeah of course", or it will stay unconscious and you will ponder why the hell you're stuck after these thousands of hours of meditating.

When you've attained the ability to sit in meditation for an extended period of time, which might require a certain degree of deconstruction for you to get there without excessive inner turmoil, it becomes clear that meditation is not just a behavioral process of sitting down and following a certain directive or technique, but in fact also an energetic process. What is this energy and what is the process? To get a sense of what the energy "is", you can try a technique like third eye meditation. You "stare" with your inner eye on a point between and slightly above your eyebrows, ideally after holding your finger close to the skin such that you create a tingling sensation. Then you "stare" at this tingling sensation and make it grow. And you might notice the sensation will spread across your forehead, and also that other sensations in your body seem to behave in the same way or even add to the sensation. This is one way to identify the type of energy we're talking about, which is a subtle form of energy which constantly travels through your body and which you can become more perceptive to with practice. To get a clearer sense of the energetic "process" (the dynamic aspect of the energy, how it travels, how it moves), you can try a technique coined by Martin Ball as "fractal energetic yoga" (20:05 for illustration). You sit or stand in a room with quite a bit of free space (or outside, but ideally on a comfortable surface) and make sure your limbs and fingers and generally your entire body are bilaterally symmetrical (your left side mirrors your right side). Then you simply sit or stand still in bilateral symmetry for a while, and then you try to move while keeping bilateral symmetry. Then try to notice how moving in a certain way is more natural or more flowy than others, where you feel a natural groove that you can tap into. If you do this enough, you might notice yourself moving spontaneously outside your will. That is when you're inhabiting the natural energetic process, the innate dynamic flow of energy that your body produces. When you have identified the energy, what it is, and how it moves, you can start to do this in your sitting meditation. As you sit there, try to notice this subtle energy and its natural flow that is going through your body. As you become more and more relaxed, as you release tensions in your body, see how the energy is executing these actions, see how it makes you move in these subtle subtle ways. Allow it to do this, observe how it's best allowed to flow. See where the energy is headed. Naturally, it's heading for your head. When you feel the energy accumulating in your head (specifically your forehead), and you feel the connection between the flow in the rest of your body and your head, strengthen that connection. Let your head become a transmission tower for your innate energy. As you transmit and release this energy, you will feel lighter, more fluid, more present. And as you continue, also in tandem with whatever meditation techniques you use, your meditation becomes deeper. So this is meditation as unwinding of energy, of emptying out and riding the natural waves of your energy. And over time, you might notice tapping into this natural flow while going about your life, in your movements, or even in your thought. This is when you start embodying or channeling the will of God. When this will becomes too strong to resist, you are now Enlightened.

How does focused attention meditation work? You focus, you get distracted, you notice the distraction, you break the distraction. What does breaking the distraction entail? It entails letting go of the injuction of the distraction. So focused attention meditation has deconstruction built into it. It's just the object of attention serves as an anchor and facilitator of the deconstruction. But it's also possible to address the deconstruction process more directly, by addressing the distractions themselves. What is driving the distractions? Are you holding on to some notions, ideas, beliefs, that make the distractions arise in the first place? What if you can let go of those notions, ideas, beliefs? Will the distractions keep occurring or will they disappear?

I awoke on an airplane while listening to Martin Ball's electronic music and breathing deeply and lovingly with my spine extremely erect, focusing intensely and lovingly on the music. The lyrics mouthed "surrender to the flow", and a few moments later, my mind shouted internally "oh shit oh shit you're dying! Do something!". I open my eyes and reach out to drink from my water bottle. My hand literally travels from my seat to the water bottle with ZERO feeling of me controlling the arm, ZERO feeling of weight, ZERO feeling of having moved by my own will. That is when I realized oh fuck this is it. I immediately turn my head to the right to look out the window and the airplane lands, and I feel like I'm at home in my old house from when I was 3 years old or younger sitting in my living room, safe, comfortable, at peace. Tears boil up, but I force them down. People are standing up and getting ready to leave. I stand up and look behind me. I see every single person, every single face, sitting there in one single space, all at once, no focus, just wide focal view. And as I walk off the plane, I'm not walking. I'm levitating. Someone else is moving my feet and it's not me. And tears come, but I press them down again. My eyes meet a child in a stroller, they catch my eyes, they keep looking, even as they pass by, they keep looking, they turn around to look behind to keep looking. What did they see? Did they see what I had seen? That worked.

I have a cold virus and I'm cranky >:) Sorry. Sorry, got you mixed up with the other person in the thread saying that. My bad. Lol. Quote Paramahansa Yogananda "you people do not know how to sleep, you pull with you all sorts of images and personal drama". How to get it to work ≠ only way to get it to work. You can awaken/meditate spontaneously without doing anything. That also works. Or staring at your own navel.

Yeah, never let go of any of your attachments. That's a good way to get stuck looping on a forum for the rest of your life.

Nowhere in history was there one single "traditional" meditation. And dynamic forms of meditation have existed since forever. ? ? In your little meta one-up game, I responded by saying that all of that was deconstruction. Letting go is deconstruction. It doesn't matter whether you're letting go of "letting go". Obviously, that is still letting go. I don't know what you're going on about. You've said things I've never said three times now.