Carl-Richard

You gotta read a quote by Plato on power.

Why is meditation so controversial? Why doesn't it work for some people but for others it explodes? Some people approach meditation like a technique only, a practice, a thing you must do with great focus, without deviation, without error, like following your breath, or "doing nothing", or watching your thoughts. This forms a central aspect of meditation, of cultivating awareness, attention, single-pointedness of mind. However, it is not the whole story. If meditation is supposed to transform your very relationship to reality, the very way you interface with life, your meditation must reflect this. Such a thing is not simple. It's a complex equation that involves unwinding patterns of your mind, of beliefs, attachments, desires, drives, reactions, responses, habits, notions. In short, it involves deconstruction. In meditation, you have to deconstruct the notion that you are a person sitting with your eyes closed that there is a world outside with things happening and things needing to be done that tomorrow or today or right now there are things needing to be done that you fundamentally care about what happens today, tomorrow or at any time that you have a life with goals and places you want to be and places you don't want to be that you are in control of your bodily movements that your bodily sensations correspond to a notion which you call your physical head or face that you have a head or face that you are sitting somewhere that you are sitting that you are breathing that you are awake that you have eyes that are looking at an empty space behind your eyelids that the feelings under your butt or feelings all around in your body correspond to the notion of a body that exists in physical space the list goes on... You want to identify and go underneath all the notions that you project onto reality, consciously and unconsciously. For example, when identifying the notion that you are sitting on your butt and that your feelings under your butt reflect this, drop the notion and focus on the feelings. Feel them for what they are in themselves. Harvest all your effort and attention and try to feel exactly what they are. Then contrast the feeling with the notion you previously connected to them, the notion of a butt sitting on some surface, and see how vacuous that notion was. The notion created an imaginary object in your mind that the feelings were slotted into. But when investigating the feelings themselves, the object was nowhere to be found. The feeling in themselves are like vaguely scattered pins and needles and feelings of pressure with no definite location or structure. But this is only one trivial notion out of hundreds and maybe thousands that you have to sort through before your consciousness lightens to the point where it can uphold states of Enlightenment. For every notion you investigate and drop, your consciousness becomes a little more fluid, a little more clear, a little lighter. Additionally, meditation is fundamentally experimental. There is no set recipe for what to tackle first or for how long to tackle each thing or in what way. It's whatever your mind throws at you, and you attend to that with all your abilities. There are so many different moods, states, headspaces and bodily configurations (breathing, posture, feeling into energetic movements, devotion, sensuality, vulnerability) that you are capable of inducing and that can be conducive to deepening the meditation, and they must all be tested. Harvesting the power of your intuition and imagination and fundamentally trusting yourself and trusting the process is the only process. All in all, your full energy and attention should be on how you can crack this nut of existence and dissolving the patterns that keep you stuck, harvesting your imagination, intuition and reason to uncover the techniques and hacks on how to do that, while releasing all blockages on all levels (bodily, emotionally, psychologically). It's the biggest project that you can embark on and requires all of your intellectual capacities, all of your intelligence, all of your devotion and passion. And in the end, you have to willing to give up everything for knowing the truth of existence and merging with Divine Love and Consciousness.

Don't need to

I once bought a juice when I forgot my fruit at the gym. I literally got a headache, so that's accurate. Maybe pasteurized doesn't compare to fresh (but I guess you would put that under orthorexia as well 🫢). Maybe if you smoke cigarettes and don't do regular exercise, orange juice vs kiwi, water vs whiskey, doesn't make much of a difference 😉 If I eat tons of flour-containing foods and no fruits or vegetables, I get digestion issues, headaches and brain fog.

"In my room alone". Does that sound like doing something? On a day to day basis (not while on vacation), are you working with something? Working towards something? Are you called on? Do people depend on you to show up?

Are sharp post-prandial glucose spikes better or worse than elongated ones? Says the guy who uses the word "nixtamalization" 🙈🙈🙈 I honestly think you're not grounded in reality or using concepts in an incredibly autistic way if you can say with a straight face "food doesn't determine energy status". I used to have problems with digestion, fatigue, headaches, irritable bowel, nausea, energy fluctuations. When I made changes in my diet, the problems disappeared. Maybe that's not a problem for you, but it's perfectly possible to live with these things in denial that food can be the cause.

My field, mindfulness meditation.

It deals with notions like "excessive".

If you're doing nothing in particular, of course you will feel disconnected and lost.

Self-fund research.

You're treating fiber reductionistically like it's this one ingredient in a recipe, like one Lego brick in the Lego tower. No, it literally changes how the nutrients in the food are absorbed. And it's not just about the fiber, it's about the fruit as a whole. In the kiwi, all the nutrients are in a matrix of a living organism. In the orange juice, you've extracted the liquid from that matrix. Merely the geometry of the fruit alone, as a whole (on its surface) and in its holarchical structure, probably has a huge impact on how it's digested. And we don't have to mention the impact of chewing something before you swallow it. Imagine putting a human in a fruit press, extracting the juices (mostly blood and other bodily fluids) and discarding the "pulp", and saying "the rest is just fiber — tissue and bone — no big deal". Again with this hyper-reductionistic thinking.

It also depends on how much of that ego was repressed and if the awakening itself lead to a reaction that caused repression (which is in fact likely). To uncover repression requires actually digging into what your ego is doing, what is its fears, its desires, its insecurities, and allowing them to come to the surface and meeting them with compassion. Which is something you can do in meditation or in therapy.

Feelings of hollowness and emptiness after awakenings are common. But it's one thing to react to that egoically and another to accept it and keep moving forward.

Brain rewires by changing behavior. What are you currently doing on a day to day basis?

Spirituality is the finger trying to point at itself. And when a spiritual teacher points, they are really just giving you the finger. — if Eric Weinstein was into spirituality.

Second most affluent part of the second biggest city in Norway. Yes.

I'll also add that after having observed my friend group that I used to smoke weed with 6-7 years ago from a sober point of view many times (while they were high and sometimes when not), I'm struck by the level of impulsivity in conversation (seemingly not thinking much before you speak, talking over each other), short attention span (jumping from topic to topic, rarely building much on what somebody else has said), and maybe consequentially the lack of depth and coherence in the conversation, and also just the lack of precision and carefulness. I'm avoiding perjoratives, but juvenile and immature obviously comes to mind.

Wh-what? I swear I just yesterday read a bit of your old thread from 2022. And now I saw this thread. What a synchronicity. Or coincidence? Conscilience? Escaping a cult is an invaluable lesson in epistemology, the nature of beliefs and self-deception. Speaking from experience 🙂 (and out of respect for the topic, I'm not going to vaguepost about it: I was in Rali's spiritual community from 2017-2018).

Posting this one here as well: "Marihuana is the drug of illusion". Maya-uana 😆

Having something to live for (meaning) and believing things can get better (growth mindset). Suicidality is tightly correlated with hopelessness. Hopelessness is a pattern of thinking that can be challenged.

F**k. I tried to find something Schizophonia-esque to say, but I guess that works.

😂 And while we're at it, we should have regular hearings for new forum guidelines and slap a judicial branch on top of all of it too 🙈

That was not the important question I wanted you to answer: have you tried therapy? Trying to solve a problem of your mind from inside your mind when the problem affects your mind, do you see how that can be difficult? You're like in a room full of mirrors and trying to find the exit. Sometimes all it takes is someone to guide you out. Going to therapy is the ultimate expression of context & construct awareness, awareness of self-deception mechanisms and epistemic humility. It shows that you accept that you don't know everything and that other people might see things you cannot see (and they definitely do).

You will be reborn and have to deal with women again, so I suggest get used to it. But seriously, have you tried therapy? Have you only tried solving your issues on your own?

Try eating a vegan diet vs an omnivore one... oh wait.