lmfao

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.

@now is forever @Leo Gura (for some reason I can't get rid of the @Leo on mobile) Quite interesting what you said about mirror neurons. I agree with you that autistic people don't lack love. My post was following on from what Leo said about some people, e.g maybe Peter Ralston maybe in the context of "Love" , having a reduced capacity to accessing certain "dimensions of reality". The existence of "Love" as a dimension of experience is fuzzy and hard to point to, as you've mentioned. I was just trying to use Love as an arbitrarily chosen example dimension, although it was a bad choice. So for now, let's forget about "Love" as a dimension and just imagine that there are other dimensions though. Despite the fact that I cannot give a concrete example for the name of one of the dimensions of measurement in the reductionist model I made up earlier I still think that the model just allows me to clearly articulate my thoughts. The main point I was trying to focus on can be demonstrated in this hypothetical situation using the model I made up earlier. Person X has a score of "3" in one dimension whilst Person Y has a score of "2". Let's assume this difference is due to there being different nervous systems between the two people. What I'm wondering is if the fact that Person Y has a lower sensitivity in this dimension than Person X means that it is likely they Person Y "makes up" for this "disadvantage" by having a higher score than Person X in a different dimension of measurement. To be precise: if we imagine the set of all possible ways in which person Y's nervous system is different from Person X I wonder whether more than 50% of these possible ways would result in Person Y compensating for the deficiency through an increased score in another dimension. I was using autism as an arbitrary example of a different brain type to say that there are probably gonna be some dimensions of measurement they are lower in, but it is probable there are other dimensions they are higher in to compensate for this fact. Yeah the actual knitty gritty details of such a model are absurd. The things it wants to measure are impossible to determine the identity of and its also impossible to quantify them.

@Roman Edouard Money can get you a bunch of material goods and services. Saying that money will keep you happy in the long term is the same as saying that hedonism will keep you happy in the long term. I feel as though adressing your claim that money will keep you happy alone just requires adressing the hedonistic mindset. The idea that purchasing whatever you want will make you happy. I think the biggest advantage of money from a happiness point of view is the fact that wealth is gonna be correlated with your social status and position in dominence hierarchies, but that will not keep you happy if you get obsessed with it and pursue it at the cost of authenticity. Do you have any sort of hardcore addictions? Have you ever done an activity again and again and found it leaves you unhappy? Because if you do, I think looking at that is one way to see through the illusion that hedonism will bring you happiness. Imagine a person who who starts to indulge in unhealthy food. For simplicities sake suppose that person starts to eating burgers and pizza every day. For the first week or so, it feels amazing. However, the pleasure from the activity starts to get diminished. 2 weeks into the thing, they probably don't even enjoy eating unhealthy food. In fact what has started to happen is that they consume more and more food because the pleasure has become diminished. If they don't have access to the food they enter deep suffering, but before starting this habit this person would not have been in deep suffering with no access to the unhealthy food. In fact they'll eventually reach the point where they're in deep suffering whilst they indulging themselves. This just doesn't apply to food. It applies to sex, having power over others, watching television, watching porn, video games and etc. I said that by indulging in unhealthy food too much the pleasure received from the activity quickly deminishes. From my experience I have found that not only does the pleasure diminish in the particular hedonistic activity you repeatedly do, but pleasure diminishes across all other hedonistic activities which you might not have even excessively indulged in. That's because by being hedonistic with just one bad habit (e.g. Sex) you destroy your brains chemical system and the joy it receives from other things (e. G. Food).

You can't be sure, I agree.

@kieranperez Sam Harris got me into spirituality as well with that meditation. I listened to the short version of the meditation he gave in a lecture but it felt amazing cuz I'd never done it before. If it wasn't for Sam Harris and Leo.... Wew lad I wouldn't be in a good place.

@NoSelfSelf In what sense are you looking for a fast way to move out? Are you looking for a fast way to find a new place to live? Looking for a fast way to become financially independent? Just a few sentences explaining your situation would help people answer your question. I may not be able to help you as much with advice as other people but take this free thread bump my brother.

@Charlotte Ive had this before when my mind is completely and utterly absorbed in a long thought story. 20-30 mins of my session will fly by and I'll forget I'm even meditating.

@Ampresus yeah I've had a similar insight. The thoughts in your head have no more truth value than random colours or sounds in your consciousness.

@Jack River You right. It's very hard to try and implement this (although I don't think there is another way besides what you said) because when I cease trying to be attentive I will slip back into my old unconscious habits.

@Moreira the way I see it, even if it old people are nicer many of them are still stage blue. From the old people I've interacted with the hold stronger traditional and cultural values. I don't think agressivity has changed. I might be wrong but if anything violent crime rates in western countries have decreased compared to what they were in 1960's,70's,80's... I could match you bringing up fucked up individualism by mentioning fucked up collectivism. You've obviously noticed how people right now care about their individual ego, but people back then might have cared a lot for the collective ego. Not saying that old people didn't do some things better. But let's not forget that western society used be more racist, misogynistic, dogmatic and judgemental. Yeah addiction is a fair point you've brought up about low consciousness since every young person is basically a technology addict. Level of consciousness isn't identical to your stage in the spiral so we might be talking past each other to some degree. The whole thing about a low vibrational state, I see what you mean. You've obviously noticed some bad stage orange excesses in society. Current society still has bad problems but I think that the problems arise from dysfunction at a higher stage in spiral dynamics on average.

@Yog most of the blue in society arises from the older individuals in that society. Old people dying out in conjunction with new people being born into the world is a mechanism through which society would move up the spiral. This mechanism is probably applicable to all cultures at every stage. The environment that successive generations are being raised in become gradually less toxic. One generation slightly improves the environment and culture for the next generation, and that next generation improves the culture and education for the generation after them. The cycle continues. Of course regression can always happen. For an individual at any given stage in the spiral, the ego will foolishly persist in their folly until their current way of being has caused so much destruction and the ego accepts this and moves on a stage. The collective ego could roughly be approximated to the sum of all the individual for egos and so the same mechanism would be in action. I think a discussion around how a collective ego would move up the spiral is just a more complex discussion of how an individual ego moves up the spiral. And moving up the spiral as an individual is a whole topic in of in itself for self-actualization. Unfortunately I don't know anything about to Odin to follow what you said at the end.

Does anyone here have any opinions on the different effects of differently pitched binaural beats? I've tried listening to theta, delta and gamma waves when meditating recently. I've tried googling online what the supposedly different effects are of these different frequencies but I just wanted to ask if anyone has actually noticed or felt these differences. Random question I thought: Does increasing frequency at a possible frequency always yield the same result as increasing the frequency at another possible frequency (e. G. so would going from delta to theta have the same effects as going from beta to gamma)? The answer is probably no since the complex effects and mechanism of action of binaural beats has, what is judged to be in my mind, a low probability of being linearly scaled with frequency.

What works for me is looking at my current state of happiness. I'm miserable and frustrated. A question that works for me is asking myself "Why aren't I happy right now?" or "What is wrong with now?". Why can't you be happy with a shitty meditation session? Why can't you be happy with shitty willpower? Why can't you be happy with these "negative" feelings inside you? Another random tip, don't overly force yourself to resist thoughts. Pay attention to the sounds on your head mindfully in the same way you would pay attention ally mindfully to the sounds in your external world. It's a quick way to see the non-existent separation between what is voluntary and involuntary. Your awareness in meditation should not originate from the intent to fix yourself, it should originate from the intent to just see what's there. I think permenant effects from meditation is a gradual process. Suppose an complete newbie does meditation for the first time and reaches a slightly higher level of consciousness. However, 15 mins after the session they are very quickly regressing to their old state. It might not be until a year a later that you're getting lasting short term effects, and then even longer to get lasting long term effects. I've been meditating for 11 months now (missing about 50-60 days) and have noticed subtle long term effects. Even though I don't know you personally my mind believes there's a high probability that continuing meditation is the right move for you.

@SQAAD Past 90 minutes of meditation and my mind gets tired. If I try to meditate for too much longer than that the session gets too intense and mentally draining for me. Meditating for longer might be inefficient and I should be fine by just trying to retain subtle mindfulness throughout the day. You meditate for longer than me and are probably more experienced with meditation than me lol. The only thing I'll say is be careful not to burn yourself by doing way too much. I speculate that you can meditate for extremely long sessions so long as you don't let the repressed negativity which surfaces up consume you.