Carl-Richard

That is exactly what is meant by illusion: it's not what it appears to be, but it "is". If something can appear as something else, then that something must also exist

#Relative/absolute fallacy

The idea that everything is an illusion is just a concession to the average persons culturally sanctioned conception of reality. In the West, reality consists of physical objects suspended in physical space. We're just individuals with separate meat-based vehicles travelling around inside our head, and we're experiencing a world that exists independent of ourselves. This is reality for most people in the West. When you say that reality is an illusion, you're saying that reality is not what it appears to be. However, when you step out of the illusion, reality is no longer illusory for you in the same fashion that it used to.

Illusions exist; they're just not what they appear to be.

It's sad when a topic made by someone who genuinely wants to understand something gets derailed like this

Try to find the specific things that you're holding on to that is creating the resistance and fear. Usually when fear arises, it tries to justify itself through thought, giving you reasons for why you should keep holding on to the fear. Try to address these things directly, whether that is about fixing something in your life or just letting go of something that you have no control over. However at the end of the day, it's all about giving up control.

He is not just pointing at a car and asking about it. He is pointing at a car, calling it an elephant, and asks why it doesn't fly.

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Inspired by Ken Wilber's "pre/trans fallacy" (conflating the pre-rational with the trans-rational), I came up with "the relative/absolute fallacy": conflating the relative with the absolute. It's the most notorious source of confusion in spirituality in general. Wilber's concept captures the confusion that somebody may encounter from an outsider perspective, while my concept is most often applicable to internal confusion within spiritual circles. Additionally, many cases of the pre/trans fallacy are actually specific cases of the relative/absolute fallacy.

Don't confuse parts of reality with reality as a whole: the absolute/relative fallacy.

@Winny When you're looking out at the world, you're only seeing the inside of your own mind. Likewise, when you look at a brain scan, everything you're seeing is still made out of mind. By looking at the supposed mechanisms of the brain, you're not actually seeing how this is supposedly creating your mind. You're only seeing the content of your own mind. How this content arises is never explained by looking at more content. There needs to be a shift in consciousness. The content has to be put in proper perspective where you see it for what it actually is. This is what Leo means by the statement that brains don't exist: you're never actually looking at something material called "a brain". You're looking at the content of your own mind. It's pure hallucination, imagination, colour. This mind is not even "your" mind. It's everybody's mind, THE mind.

@WHO IS What is the benefit of knowing anything?

Notice how the belief about the brain only arises as a thought. Try to see what happens when you're not thinking.

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Please stop. This is turning into a parody

That really depends on the amount of work you put in otherwise. Everything adds up

Projection

@MarkKol When you fast, your digestion shuts down, and your body literally becomes "quiet". Your digestion actually creates noises and movements, and you will notice a difference when meditating. You also eliminate the fluctuation of blood sugar and bloodflow to the brain (digestion uses a lot of your available blood volume). Those are the immediate effects after entering ketosis: summed up it creates more stability and mental clarity. Long term effects will be a reset of the gut biome and increased cellular efficiency due to cell autophagy. Overall, it has a cleansing effect on your body and mind, and this can help in facilitating spiritual progression.

Contemplate these questions: Where do I go after I die? What existed before I was born? What existed before the universe existed? What is outside the universe? What is nothing? What is infinity?

I personally would try to limit the amount of schemes you have to keep straight in your head before doing psychedelics. In other words, lying to your parents opens up a world of neurotic patterns that you'll sooner or later have to work through in this work.

@Jacobsrw I think you're being overly cynical about this whole thing. If he said he discovered spirituality 3 years ago then I see no reason to not believe him. However, what that entails for his depth of awakening is another question entirely. Regardless, I personally wouldn't care about gatekeeping the realm of spirituality or judge the validity of someone's statements by eyeballing their spiritual purity, but you do you.

Actually quite on the contrary, a peak stage orange/green person is the perfect candidate for entering spirituality, seeing how they've exhausted that stage and truly seen it for its limitations. He has been successful for many years, which means he has had that potential for a long time. Purely based on that alone, I don't think it's unreasonable that he has been on the path for 3 years like he is claiming. Also, why would he lie about that? I strongly disagree about the claim about hedonism. I was ultra-hedonistic when I discovered spirituality, and I still kept that up for a couple of years. They go hand-in-hand. It's only after maturing in your spirituality that you truly out-grow the pathologies of the past stages (even so, you never quite leave any stage behind).

When I sit still for a while, I tend to get this build up of pressure around the bridge of my nose and in the middle of my forehead. It also manifests itself as a jolting or spasm in the upper neck (it slightly turns my head to one side), like there is a tiny discharge of pent up energy. My mom who is a doctor has commented on it and tries to make sense of it within her paradigm, but I believe this isn't reducible to physical science, mainly because If I meditate deeply to the point of losing my sense of self, it vanishes completely. What is this energy and what is it doing to my neck?

Learn to identify psilocybin mushrooms and go pick em (it's illegal btw)

Be fucking careful. That movie scared the living shit out of me. I'm not kidding. It's like the most accurate cinematic representation of a bad trip.