lmfao

@Cammy yeah probs

@Quantum_fluctuations Whether you feel or don't feel compassion, feel sad or happy, feel anxious or scared, do it in the spirit of zen.

bump

"There is neither creation nor destruction,neither destiny nor free will, neither path nor achievement. This is the final truth." - Ramana Maharshi

@SoonHei This whole inquiry process is so weird. I try to come up with an articulate way of describing how I feel, but I end up deleting it because it feels inadequate. One way I see it, reality is always in a situation you never created. Your thoughts, awareness, sensations of pressure, everything which composes your consciousness, is uncreated by you. Existence always has and always will be effortless. And then I also feel the paradox of how can any perception of experience exist in the absence of time. Supposing all we have is now, and time doesn't exist, then how is it that any perceptions exist? Let's look at language and thought. Whenever one thinks of a word, e.g. "cat" and has it in their mind, I have the perception that I have this word totally grasped in my mind. However, it takes a time which is not equal to zero seconds for this word to pass through my mind. If everything is now, how does perception exist? Without time, how can sensations and perceptions exist and change? You don't have to look at language and thought, you can look at any perceived happening in consciousness. A random theoretical thought I have had. Just a thought experiment entertaining the existence of time. Consider an interval of time, e.g. 10s. Between 0 and 10 are an infinite(ie endless) number of numbers, and so there are an infinite number of snapshots of time. Essentially what is going on is that this 10 second interval is composed of an infinite number of points. It perhaps then be said that this 10 second interval is mathematically equal to an infinite sum of points. Within the 10 second interval, you can see all sorts of events and happening transpire. But if we are to define this interval of time as being equal to the sum of an infinite number of points, let's look at one of these points. Maybe one of these points is what we'd call "the present moment". So let's look at the present moment. Everything is frozen. Nothing is going on at an individual point (and something is happening in this 10 second interval) , yet theoretically it is impossible for this 10 second interval to not be defined as the sum of all these points. Points are zeroth dimensional objects, and graphically speaking lines of all possible sizes are composed of an infinite number of points. To get even more theoretical about infinity as it is described in maths. Between any two numbers we say that there are an "infinite" number of numbers. The way I see it, infinity can mean "more can be generated" in some situations. Suppose I'm looking at all the possible numbers between 1 and 2. Consider the number 1.01 . I can put a "1" after the last digit to generate a number, 1.011, and from that new number I can put another "1" after the last digit to generate another number, 1.0111. This process of adding numbers after the last digit goes on forever. So from a certain perspective, "infinity" is just a consequence of how the mathematical language is defined. As the mathematical language is defined, I'm allowed to generate as many numbers as I want between 1 and 2. So from a certain perspective, in this particular situation there's perhaps a certain arbitrariness to "infinity" in this context since the word "infinity" is just pointing towards an "exploit" /"glitch" in the language that we ourselves have created.

@SoonHei good post. A confusing aspect about words when trying to find out who you really are is that any set of words you use are inadequate. For example to put across what I mean, if I say that I am the mind, I then start defining the mind. After that, I then construct a sentence defining every word I used in the sentence to define the mind. After that, I then construct a sentence defining every word I used in the sentence which defined every word I used to define the mind. The process just goes on forever, words never get you anywhere.

@brugluiz According to the same test you took I got 17/20 which would apparently indicate that I am an empath. One thing I can relate to about being an "empath" is the sense that you strongly feel the atmosphere and vibe of a room, and that's something I can actually relate to quite heavily despite having autistic traits. What I find funny however is despite the fact that tests will tell me I'm an empath other tests I take will tell me I have sociopathic traits.

@Preetom What really matters probably isn't the verbal descriptions and arguments you give for free will. What really matters is probably just where your awareness is. I see no reason your view isn't workable, in fact I might like it. Who knows if there is free will or predetermination. The way I guess I might see it is that reality is always in a situation which you did nothing to create. Even the facet of reality that is your awareness is beyond your control, it is just the way it is.

@Fairy It obviously depends what you mean by "you' isn't it. There are two ways of looking at it: you do everything or everything happens to you, and both are right.

@Joseph Maynor Random question which is just me asking asking out of boredom, but how confident do you feel about the existence of the stages (e.g. blue or yellow or any other color) in spiral dynamics and the existence of the progression of these stages? I'm just interested in what you say because you seem to have thought/read about spiral dynamics a fair bit. On the one hand I sort of believe in it, but on the other hand I don't know whether any Spiral Dynamics explanations I have about things are just confirmation bias. Random thought I had on confirmation bias. Supposing that the world was entirely rational and logical and could be explained with the metaphysics of your bog-standard empiricist it follows that the human mind is neither smart enough or observant enough to logically sort through all the events and happenings in the universe (the universe is too chaotic with way too many variables). And because our brains are not powerful enough ( you could think of IQ as being a component of "power" if you want) to work out the "true answer" to certain questions my mind will instead deduce the answer to questions by using an increased number of assumptions and increased number of jumps in logical reasoning. Supposing that in reality it takes 100 logical steps to reach the true answer to a question, my mind might only use 6 steps due to the presence of further assumptions and jumps in reasoning which are caused by my world view (e.g. spiral dynamics). good answer

@Joseph Maynor Are you saying that Spiral Dynamics is "not just a set of beliefs" because you believe there's value in the beliefs?

I'm probably gonna start off at a bit of tangent just describing my experience and then I'll go into my actual question. My mood is too much like a yoyo, and this is probably the case for other people with depression. There have been moments during some of my days where I'm all of the sudden swept by a feeling of lifelessness. I'll lack the energy and motivation to move a single muscle in my body. Simple acts like even walking and talking feel like a drag. I've had what is depression for at least 2+ years now, and I'm 18 right now. I've been on an SSRI for 2 years. I also have anxiety problems. I had this feeling sweep over me today after meditating for 80 mins today. Although the feeling has significantly subsided in intensity, I've noticed that the feeling is always present in my conscious experience its just that I've never been mindful of it until now. Even as I type this sentence I notice that the feeling is in my experience, and if I wanted to I could let that emotion spread throughout my body and try to be mindful of it but Im in an extremely large habit of constantly resisting it. Because trying to be mindful of it feels hard, although it feels more doable for me than it did before. I've started to sort of accept the emotion but its a very big leap to make. It almost feels like im forced to make the conscious decision to resist the emotion because it feels like too much to digest. Any time that I've taken the first one or two steps to changing deep rooted habits I'm always ambushed by the same demon. I've tried googling what cures there are for low mood and depression, but the "cure" just basically seems to be all of self help. I initially made this thread with the intention of finding biological hacks but as I'm typing this I realise that there probably aren't any. I don't think there's some magic way that I can just easily fix my neurotransmitters or whatever the fuck it is. From a scientific view, anything about is due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. And whilst it is unhelpful to play the role of victim with "bad genetics" I cant help but feel I'm cursed with genetic factors. One of my parents has pretty bad depression, one of them has pretty bad anxiety issues, and I have a strong family history of psychosis. Whether or not I'm genetically predisposed to depression probably has little bearing on what the solution is for me. Note: The title of this thread reached the character limit so I had omit putting "the" before "biological".

This is the closest thing to art for me when I'm bored

@Anton Rogachevski the way see it, if the past and future is an illusion and all you literally have is the present then in what way is it meaningful to describe awareness as something that changes? All there is is the awareness right NOW. Its just the way it is right now, saying it changes or doesn't change is a concept. All you know is that there is awareness. Edit: The illusion of time is something I've often pondered and is a source of great paradox. Because logically speaking, does perception even exist in the absence of time? How can time exist if all we have is the present? For example, consider the fact that it takes a time which is not equal to zero seconds for a word to pass through my mind (e.g. the word "cat"). If all we have is the present moment then in what sense does the perception of even words exist if time does not exist?

@VioletFlame It's the intuitive feeling you have about your craft that makes it beautiful to engage in. It's the sort of thing no-one can put into words. So true lol. What I will say is that even if one is in a meditative state with low monkey mind activity you will still have to "think" about your activity to be competent at the activity if you aren't a master at the activity.

@clouffy When it comes to looking at someones mental functioning overall, IQ is probably something to look at. I think that not having a high IQ would not matter for a lot of things provided that other facets of your mind are good. One thing I think IQ likely does not account for is deeply rooted intuition which masters of a particular field tap into and build. That sort of thing isn't fleshed out by an IQ test. Anecdotally I'm biased and feel IQ tests are a bit bullshit. Throughout my life I have always been bad at english academically compared to mathematics and science, yet when I took an IQ test I scored substantially better in verbal facets of IQ in contrast to non-verbal and mathematical facets of IQ. The usefulness of looking at studies showing what IQ is correlated with when trying to understand yourself is ,in my opinion, less than the usefulness of just looking at yourself directly. Who cares what's true on average, look for what's true about you individually.

@VictorB02 Leaving aside what I'm able to practically achieve for school or university environments (for reasons I could elaborate on), I think that ideally notes should be made only after you have taken in and learnt the information. This way then process of writing notes involves you having a conceptual understanding in juxtaposition to mindlessly copying down sentences you read/hear. Mindlessly copying down shit you don't understand isn't efficient, although it might be something you have to do depending on your situation.

@Mu_ Yeah its the illusion of free will and moral culpability.

this. Although I'm not a fan of books on non-duality in general. "Anyone who tells you he has some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment is like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch...." - Alan Watts

@Simke I think that you'd run into the same problem with anyone you meet, irregardless of what kind of relationship you want to form with them. This made me lol irl

@John West I don't meditate for as long as you lol so my advice might be useless since you could already have a better posture than me. Whenever I meditate I try to get as large a surface area of contact between the sides of my legs and the ground. This distributes my weight over a larger area and decreases pressure. And intense pain is part of the point of SDS lol, although intense pain which is prematurely induced by bad posture cant be good for your body in the long run. Do you mediate for 150 mins regularly? Does the long period of time of meditation feel more effective than like a 60 or 90 minute session? Because I'm considering increasing the time I meditate for. Because I think that it takes me a long time to enter the zone, and perhaps I'm ending the session just before things get good.

If anyone here has looked into it I'm interested what you have to say. As far as scientific measurements go for changes in state during meditation all I've looked at is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_activity_and_meditation "Recent studies have shown heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, frontal cortex, and prefrontal cortex, specifically in the dorsal medial prefrontal area during Vipassana meditation. Similarly, the cingulate cortexand frontal cortex areas were shown to have increased activity during Zen meditation" Areas of the brain close to your forehead have increased activity, so maybe this is why you have tingling on your forehead? Even so, it's a weird phenomena and I'm not sure whether there is an explanation. As far as spinal tingling and other weird sensations on back go I have nothing to say.

@Roman Edouard I think that most people on this site would give you the perspective that it's the "ego" which doesn't want to be happy all the time, and that it's possible to reach a new form of permanent happiness once the ego is gone. Its a happiness which goes beyond what your ego deems as "pleasurable" or "painful". I don't necessarily know if this perspective is right but I'll elaborate a bit. Our consciousness is an amalgamation of sensations, feelings, colours, sounds, thoughts and etc. There are certain sensations which are deemed pleasurable and there are other sensation which are deemed negative. I've come to feel from meditation that the raw sensation of something "negative" isn't actually negative, its just a different flavour from something "positive". Saying that the raw sensation of tasty food is superior to the raw sensation of fear might be like saying " blue is objectively superior to red", when these things are just different from each other and are equal in value. But for some reason unbeknownst to me, our mind at a subconscious and conscious level will cause some sensations to be seen as bad whilst other sensations to be seen as good. But is it perhaps possible to change the way your mind processes these different sensations through mindfulness?

@Roman Edouard true, money will give you more opportunity to do cool shit and also develop yourself. By luck I have been born in the west, and wasn't born to a poverty stricken family in a third world country where everyday I would be struggling to even sustain physical survival. I would have never learnt about mindfulness or conciousness work at all. Mindfulness is something people of all wealth levels can engage in provided they've learnt the basics, and I believe its theoretically possible for somebody in even the worst possible life environment to be happy if they are fully enlightened and in the present moment. Money is an enabler for happiness, but it won't fix a rotten psyche which is miserable and depressed. That's the way I see it.