lmfao

@Pouya One way you might come across nothing would be to say to yourself "Whats creating this present moment experience"? What could be the answer to the question if your entire reality is the present moment? Or maybe you should self inquiry of some sort. Like asking yourself "what am I?". What makes the thoughts that pop into you head different the sounds you hear outside? What are the origin of things you call yourself and the origin of things you call other?

@Cocolove 14 months or so. I hope so

@Jkris There are too many good ones:

@Jkris Yeah you seem to get what to do. I'd say that if you're looking for someone who can best point towards non-duality with words, I'd reccomend alan watts. He has many good videos on YouTube. I can link a few if you want. Terms like "surrender", "awareness", "resistance" can be very important to use when talking about mindfullness/non-duality yet these terms cannot be adequately defined. I've found myself wondering what is "awareness" and what is "attention". I can't tell what exactly suffering and low consciousness is. If you're in a higher consciousness state, it's as though you have an effortless attention (which is almost a paradox) for all the contents of your consciousness. But in low consciousness state, there's some sort of constriction of your attention/awareness or at the very least the feeling that there's some sort of constriction on your experience. And then there's obviously thoughts which are central to everything. The problem I have is this. By very virtue of the fact that I have a low level of consciousness at the times I have a low level of consciousness, it's very hard to "figure out" how low consciousness functions. Figuring out the relation betweenï thought, awareness, attention is confusing and what's all the more confusing is that once you're in a high consciousness state none of this talking matters at all and there are no problems. One good way to think about reducing your suffering, is that you realise that the thoughts which are in your head are of the exact same origin of all things external to you. The origin of everything you do and the origin of everything that happens external to you are the same. If you realise that the external and internal and one, the feeling that life is a drag and effort will dissappear. Reality in its essence is just an uncaused, spontaneous hapenning which literally "comes from" nothing. The present moment is all you have and all you will ever have, and you didn't have to do anything to create this moment. One experiment which might work for you. Listen to your thoughts just as if they were noise in the external world.

@Jkris If you force yourself to do strong determination sitting or force yourself to meditate for a long period of time, there'll be pain arising. If you can sit through the pain and surrender to it you'll train your mind to surrender. You might look at my answer and roll your eyes but it's the truth.

@phllip103 I make sure to expose my retina to as much blue light as possible. I make my sleeping pattern as erratic as possible to make mess with my hormonal balance.

@Harikrishnan If they make the right choices anyone can be successful. Wait I didnt even realise ive already replied to this thread, lol. idk about success but definitely well being. @BjarkeT all is well

Greeeeeeeeeeeeeen

me neither?

@BjarkeT I don't think indeterminism implies free will, not that you were arguing it does. Quantum mechanics isn't total randomness by the mere fact that there are still mathematical and probabilistic models to it. But it is still randomness. To me, randomness is exhibited in a system if the same initial conditions do not always yield identical ending conditions. Lets consider two possible state of affairs for how systems evolve. If it is deterministic, well theres obviously no free will. But if the system is random, how does that randomness mean that your choices were "free"? Is there any moral culpability that can be assigned to dice rolls, or can dice rolls really make free will exist for the ego in some meaningful sense? If something is random its out of control. Whether or not a system evolves deterministically or randomly, it really has no impact on whether you are "free". For the sake of a hypothetical, lets just say that the choice a person will make is determined by how two particles in their brain will react. There are 4 possible ways those particles react, and each different way will result in a different choice being made. The probability of each type of reaction happening is 25%. In what sense is there "free will" here?

This is a question about visualising in relation to a/the body. For example, a kriya yoga exercise says to visualise prana moving though the spine. To do this, do I keep a vivid image of my body in my mind and then abstractly manipulate that image by having prana flow? Or is this visualising done another way. The other way being that I visualise in tight relation to the physical body I am. So what I mean by this, is that I consider the physical location of my spine and the sensations within it in consciousness (theres also the location of your spine relative to your face), and manipulate my attention around that physical location? Or are both these things done at the same time?

@Space Yeah I usually do the second option. Putting my attention on my physical body in this way. But mental imagination is also important, like you say.

I personally find Peter Ralston a little strange to listen to in recordings, even though I can strongly resonate with his book. I think its just for whatever reason something feels a bit unexpected and/or out of place when I listen to him, but it is not at all in a bad way really. He's actually quite charming. If I had to guess, he comes across as someone who's perhaps a bit insensitive of others? Of course this is just a guess.

Hm alright. Thanks for the advice.

Oh dear

How could there be some sort of "why" reason. Things are just what they are.

An interesting article I found, which states that conceptualising the human brain in strict terms to that of a computer would be a mistake despite how popular it is https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer Ofc the article offers very little in terms of an alternative scientific model, but thats fine. It is what it is.

Where do the past and future exist?

@Aeris If there's no past and no future, in what sense does free will exist on a level which implies moral culpability?

Adyashanti, Alan watts, Sadhguru, Ramana Maharshi, Shinzen Young. Alan Watts is extremely good at articulating the essence of non-duality. Ramana Maharshi and Sadhguru are just fucking sages. People I haven't listened to, but others on this forum seem to like: Eckhart Tolle, Jed McKenna, Rupert Spira, Mooji.

@Shin @Shin oh please ?

@Shin @Preetom Can you two just kiss each other already? Flirting with each other in every thread. No homo.

@Sharp What's gotten you to the point that you want to kill yourself physically? What are the sources of your suffering? Have you ever had deep spiritual experiences Sharp? Because if you do (or if you have) you'll laugh yourself silly at the whole game your ego was playing to generate suffering. That isn't to say the ego and your suffering is trivial because its game, a game can be played with full sincerity even if it's not serious. You can always wait till another day to kill yourself physically. If your life is already in total shit, and you have nothing to lose , then just kill the current person you are rather than killing your body. If it will get you to consider not taking your life, then perhaps taking some sort of drastic change in your life situation or environment will ease your existential boredom a little. Some videos you might have interesting:

There is too much I can write but imma try and keep it brief if I can since I dont want you to get bored. I want you to disregard technicalities such as "everything is subjective" (e.g. when I describe such and such personality/funcntion as being more or less concerned with whats subjective/objective) when reading this, im using words and descriptors as they are most typically thought of and as pointers to something I hope you get a tangible feel and intuition of. This is very important to remember in what I type. Youtube videos made on this channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmDcT_Pujk8vOcxk_IcnxtQ about typology are pretty good. I remember watching some of his videos talking about different cognitive functions and different axes, about why these axes differ from each other due to them coming from different angles than each other. In found them extremely enlightening in understanding how people can extremely similar but extremely different at the same time in a subtle way. Within MBTI there are "perception" and "judgement functions". There are 2 judgement axes and 2 perception axes. Judgement axes: - Ti and Fe - Te and Fi Perception axes: - Ni and Se - Ne and SI Everyone has one perception axis and one judgement axis, which in turn compose their four cognitive functions. To phrase things in a rough way which needs further elaboration, Ne-Si axis and the Fe-Ti axis are in a sense "universalist, democratic and fair minded" whilst Ni-Se and Fi-Te axes are more "contextual, monarchic and goal orientated". As you can see there are 8 different functions in the entire theory. Functions are the "why" and "how" to people's behaviour rather than the "what". Universalistic axes and are looking to "take themselves out of the equation" in a sense. There is an underlying theme to how extraverted functions differ from introverted functions. To phrase it roughly, extraverted functions view the subjective as fickle and the objective as more reliable while introverted functions regard the objective as fickle and the subjective as more reliable. Feeling functions and thinking functions are judgement functions, sensing and intuition functions are perception functions. I made a playlist of insightful videos. I was just watching the Ne vs Ni video and I was shocked at how extraordinarily accurate it was. You may want to first watch one or two of this youtube channels' "types revisited videos" after knowing what your type is (through a test). First two videos are similar to each other. Watch the axes videos before the individual function videos if you want, its all up to you. From watching his videos, I was amazed at how well he articulated the strengths that different thinkers and intellectuals have. I myself use Ne, but Ni is extremely powerful as well in how it can detect very subtle and subjective associations between things and Ni is looking for the subtle "essence" that many different variables and happenings share. Ne goes from the one to the many, Ni goes from the many to the one (roughly speaking). Ne likes to connects the dots and makes many associations between many many "objective" things and take those things "in of in themselves", and can view Ni as not accepting things as they are in an "objective" level. But both Ni and Ne are extremely good and are just different modes of being. INTP (my type) and INTJ have opposite axes and functions to each other and in talking to people who are INTJ and INFJ I feel I've gotten a very tangible feeling for how these functions feel and where they come from. INTP's solely have "democratic/universalistic" functions whilst INTJ's solely have "monarchical/contextual" functions. I found ALL of his function comparative videos enlightening. Clashes I've had in Ti vs Te in talking to people, and how arguments get circular. I found his description very insightful. Even Si vs Se, Fe vs Fi are all extremely good videos. And in watching people speak and give talks, it seems extremely obvious when someone is using a particular cognitive function. Jordan Peterson uses Ni a lot, Leo uses Ti and Ne a lot are just some examples of speakers ive listened to. Chomsky uses Ni. Nietzsche is Ni.