Carl-Richard

All answers are at worst and best incomplete, but the simpler answers are often more complete.

That is the irony of mysticism and why some newbies get confused. They see all these people who can't stop themselves from speaking about the unspeakable, and it gives them the wrong picture. This thread is an attempt to rectify that.

I predicted what my mom and my brother got on their tests

That was the boring part of the discussion. The rest is hilarious.

Thanks for summing up the cataphatic approach! My take is that the apophatic approach is mandatory as an introduction for newbies, which essentially makes the distinction between mysticism and theology, i.e. God is an experience and not an intellectual problem. Once that lesson is understood, then you can start exploring the most accurate definitions however you like.

Same. I'm basically back to normal now.

I got COVID thursday last week (double vaxxed) and I was pretty ill for a few days afterwards. Now a week later, I still feel a bit lethargic and not completely mentally present. I would say the mental aspect is the most annoying one for me. Has anybody else experienced anything similar? How long did it take before you were back to normal again? I liked my brain before COVID so I hope I can get it back

This is the truth of suffering (Dukkha), the first of the Four Noble Truths. This was the theme of my first LSD trip.

I don't need to trust you on that Yeah that is why I like making that distinction. Yes, technically there is nothing to DP but dissociation, and complete dissociation is no self, but incomplete dissociation is not.

I believe all of this is implied, except the highlighted part. I think it's just a semantic issue. In DP/DR, you dissociate, yes, but there is still an identification with a separate self. When the dissociation is more complete, it's awakening.

Bernardo Kastrup describes it like this: DP/DR is when your separate self dissociates and loses touch with parts of itself. When the dissociation ends, you return to your previous self. Separate self is when God dissociates and loses touch with parts of itself. When the dissociation ends, you return to Oneness.

@Inliytened1 You could argue it involves the same mechanism, but the result is different. Bernardo Kastrup essentially argues this.

When somebody says "I exist", they can be referring to two things: 1. their psychological identity, or 2. the fact of being aware. When Sadhguru says he doesn't exist, what he is really saying is that his psychological identity no longer defines who he is. He is simply awareness, which means that he is all of existence (and non-existence). The psychological identity is localized, finite and something you can point to, meanwhile awareness is prior to pointing, non-local and infinite.

What are your thoughts about it?

I guess not

I've experienced both and they're not the same.

You never know if you've walked past an enlightened person on the street and caught an accidental transmission

Are you going to say something clever now?

Are you primarily driven by inside or outside forces?

Since you seem to be new to this, I will present the three principles of the "apophatic" approach to the problem of describing God: 1. Stay silent. 2. Distinguish between "the relative" and "the Absolute" (between the descriptions, thoughts or worldly manifestations of and about the transcendent and the transcendent in and of itself). 3. The apophatic language: 3.1 Metaphors: e.g. "God is an emanation, self-illuminated, like the sun." 3.2 Deontologization: don't think of God as an object or a creature. 3.3 Dialectic between transcendence and immanence: e.g. God is both the relative and the Absolute, both thought and being, both form and formlessness, both manifest and unmanifest.

You are already manifesting whatever you want.

@Dumuzzi Most people who seek out these things are familiar with the path, and only a few are receptive to it. You could say the same thing for amusement park rides. There is always some people who will have a panic attack.

Collecting student debt

People seem to be missing the context. Leo essentially said constructions are imperfect (hence the desire to deconstruct them), and some guy responded with confusion, thinking that he said constructions aren't useful, and I just reiterated the point (in maybe a bit too abstract way, sure).