billiesimon

Right after the "spotted giraffe" comment by Leo, a striped giraffe has appeared

Addendum: The two main areas that I'm curious about are - Getting the confidence and the peace of mind, the stillness, to create financial freedom without feeling the absolute dread I feel right now in my ego - Getting the confidence and the sense of Love and Unity to FIND and CONNECT with new people and find new friends, a new social life

Thanks for the HRV suggestions, I'm gonna try it this week! Thanks for the other advices too

I've practiced meditation for a year and three months now, precisely mindfulness meditation (without labeling), in my personal variation, which is: I sit, I let the initial monkey mind subside. Then I concentrate on the silent gaps without thoughts and ACTIVELY try to focus on them. This generally stops A LOT of thoughts, so I actually use a proactive form of meditation to intentionally avoid thoughts. And it works, I have had several moments of trance and even partial loss of time/space feelings. But I want to find out a very powerful trick/method to go EASILY into deep trance, deep loss of time/space/ego, in a normal meditation session. What techniques, music, settings etc do you suggest?

I have started a Self Inquiry journal here: I will explore more of the Hand Technique and more of the different variations of Self Inquiry, to exit the matrix of ego

Leo suggests in some videos to look at your hand for an entire session of self-inquiry/meditation, and see what insights you can get. Yesterday I tried it, and I intend to keep doing it for some weeks. This is what happened: - I did a 45 minutes session, without a break. Only some small blinking to refresh the eyes. - At first it felt very stupid. "This is my hand, wtf am I doing?" - Then thoughts almost disappeared and my hand became clearer and more "as it is", less conceptual. - Around half of the session, the hand started to feel alien to me. Like some kind of space creature's hand, a humanoid hand. - Then the shape of my hand started slightly shifting, and it became somehow skewed and crooked, like the bones were almost injured. The hand was still alien, and now the alien sensation increased. - This is where I freaked out: the hand started to become partially psychedelic! The flesh started pulsating, and the patterns of the skin started to move in rythm like when you are influenced by LSD. - In the last psychedelic stage (again, I was completely sober) the outline of my hand gained this dark blue neon aura... and the aura was somehow melted with the floor under the hand. The inside of the hand was still psychedelic. Then the neon aura started to pulsate and spread inside the hand itself, intermittently, like a christmas light, the inside of the hand was one moment made of psychedelic skin, then made of neon blue light and so on and so forth. At some point I freaked out and squeezed my eyes to check if it was just an illusion. Reopening my eyes, there were still some traces of psychedelia, but the hand was returned to the alien-humanoid appearance, no more trippy effects. After some minutes, the concentration somehow disappeared and the hand reverted back to human, just not my hand. As soon as I thought "ok, that's enough, it's 45 minutes", the hand returned to look exactly like MY HAND, and that's it. So... what I don't understand is.... Is this just a distortion of the mechanics of my eyes/brain? Maybe due to the fatigue of looking intensely and with concentration at the same object? Or does it have metaphysical meaning? I can't really tell.....

I'm still shocked at how FAST these insights came in. I'm still new to self inquiry, while with meditation I have more than a year of exp. That possibility is open to me.... I need to inquire all 5 senses and then emotions and thoughts. Then I'll move to my existence. My end goal is finding where I am, what I'm made of.

Great decision! Have a nice solo retreat

INSIGHT #3 (today) 40 minutes session - half of it in a meditative pose, closed eyes - half of it laying on the bed, OPEN eyes, staring at the room It seems like SIGHT and INTERNAL TOUCH (bodily sensation) are completely disconnected. We actually THINK about their connection, thus creating a false sense of connection between "image of a leg" and "sensation of a leg". Also.... what is a leg? Is it the image? is it the touch sense? It cannot be both, because those senses seem to be disconnected. One is a cinema screen (sight) , the other seems to be.... very muddy, very MYSTERIOUS. What is touch? Oh my god... after my 40 mins session I've come to a partial conclusion that touch is actually a VERY MYSTERIOUS perception, which creates some kind of energy fluctuating IN THE VOID!!!! So.... to make it more dramatic and more shocking: You see your leg, but that's just a picture, a painting of a leg, and it has NO sensations, apart from the seeing sensation. But when you think that you "feel" the internal/external touch of your leg.... that seems to be a HUGELY MYSTERIOUS UNKNOWN SENSATION. It has no correlation with the actual depiction of the leg! So.... what happens is that you USE THOUGHT to create this picture-touch complex, which doesn't exist in experience. But thought creates this kind of ghost connection between "eyesight" and "skin-feeling/internal feeling". Still I can't grasp the nature of touch... it really seems to be a random energy fluctuating in the void of nothingness ---------------------------------------------- I'll keep you updated.

Amazing compilation thanks!

Thanks! I've tried Kriya a year ago, but some techniques are really complicated. I'm going to try shamanic breathing!

UPDATE >>> Session 2 and 3 2nd session No particular insights, just a slight sense of alien-hand, and a lot of monkey mind noise about "this is my hand, what the heck are you contemplating about?". 3rd session - HOLY F*CK!! OH MY GOD, if this insight is true... it means that a huge chunk of reality is a HUGE misconception! I don't know if it is true but... it seems to point to a very important insight. >>>> After 30 minutes of looking at my hand in movement (i was constantly moving it to see its shapes and forms)... I realized that I can't actually see the back of my hand!!!! I mean... you ALWAYS see the front appearance of an object!!!! "What are you talking about? You can turn your hand and see the back , or the inside, if you are looking at the back" That was the logical voice in my head. NO!!! You always look at some perfectly painted picture where the images are CONCEPTUALIZED to be the front/back side!!! Kids DON'T see the back of the hand when it's on the front, and to them the back doesn't exist until it shows up. But.... the back and the front are just LABELS!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!! We have labeled some many aspects of the objects around us that we THINK that reality has a back side!!! At least from what I have felt in this session... there seems to be NO BACK SIDE to reality!!! What you see is what IS. I'm still not sure if this is right but... I've noticed that when the hands move, they are just shapeshifting, and we are just taught at school that they do not shapeshift, but they just turn around to the back. WHAT IF they ACTUALLY shapeshift on a screen?!?!??! Let me know what you think about it... but I'm actually puzzled by this semi-insight.

Not intellectual ones. I mean, I was just shocked. What I realized was just that I never really perceived the hand, but only conceptualized it all my life. And even if I look at it right now, it seems actually different from how it's always been in the past. There's less concept about the hand, and more marvel at its "weird" shape.

Amazing insight about what seems like a random "unlucky" event to the masses. I actually think that this event is Consciousness imposing a moment of self reflection in humanity, because of the rampant ego and corruption it has developed. But that's just my guess. It strikes me that I have started hardcore self inquiry at the beginning of this year and become less distracted by social life, and now this event happens

I've been doing self inquiry every single day for three weeks now, and one huge benefit it has given me is more presence. I'm more present to the moment and less in my head. But there's still huge confusion about it even though I've watched both Leo's videos about it. I've reached just today, immediately after the SI session, a slight sense of "watching myself on tv". I mean... just after today's session, I've felt like these hands, these feet, these bodily sensations etc were 80% "mine" and 20% from a character I'm watching on a screen, a videogame character. And of course when I focus on the 80% that feels like me, I can't find my core. But when I focus on the 20% that feels like a movie character I perceive this very fleeting perception of being a non-physical entity that's watching my character. Just 1 or 2 seconds and then I'm lost in a cloud of confusion. Is this 20% movie-feeling the right direction to go with self inquiry? Is this progress or self deception?

By the way thanks for the great insights ????

Ahahahah yes, definitely it was shown to me that existence is infinite present Maybe it was meant for me to be in this condition here and now. Maybe it's not a mistake. Sometimes I feel like my life had to be this way, or I would have never felt the burning desire to awake. RIght now I'm completely obsessed with waking up to my true nature, and until last year it was not important at all. Money and videogames were far more important and now they have become so empty, even though I'm not rich at all. What LSD has shown me has made me realize that I was chasing rubbish and ignoring the gold. Now the problem is: how do I dig the gold out?

Yeah, it's like discovering that I actually don't know anything about myself, and that I have so many implanted beliefs about "myself" that I'm in a state of total confusion. I've been told that I am the body, I am the mind, I am x, y and z.... I realize that children might actually know what is really happening here, but they get consistently brainwashed into thinking they are this and that, and they stop observing reality, and start obsessing over these "learned concepts". That's the deeper wisdom I couldn't catch here. I've been so disconnected from experience that thoughts have become a substitute for experience. Like when you imagine in your head that your friend is angry at you, and start to feel sad, while in reality you have no evidence whatsoever that he's angry at you. But you focus so much on that thought that you create some kind of magic spell, and it mesmerizes you. It seems almost like actual experience, but it's not Maybe I don't actually know what the heck I am. Maybe I'm doing this inquiry because "thought-reality" is starting to fall apart for me, and I realize that I have never really looked into the mirror to see what I'm like. It's not easy. Like digging myself out of meters and meters of ground to actually see the sun for the first time. I may sound naive, but thanks to my psychedelic experience, now I feel like I have deeply forgotten my real self and the result of forgetting is endless suffering. To be precise, I have this feeling that ignorance is suffering. I am ignorant and in the dark, that's why I suffer, I guess.

The answer interests me too. To be more precise: Is presence enough to realize our true nature?

Again thanks for the great explanation ? The first day it was easier because I was just accepting the present moment, now it's like a battlefield of thoughts, anxiety and moments of quiet in between Yeah, in my psychedelic trip I experienced a feeling of almost total unity with reality, a feeling of receiving free love and giving free love. Abundance is also a good term. But, coming back into my ego, there's this dreadful feeling of separation from reality. There's fear, scarcity, judgement... a general sense of "I am here in my closet and reality is out there ignoring me". I get it that it is mind-created, but to be honest I actually feel separation. Or if this separation is mind-created... it still feels very realistic and tricky The fleeting moments of "presence" during self inquiry are the only ones where I can feel that there's no fear, but outside of these quick moments the fear and separation feel very "realistic". I may sound idiotic but that's what I feel that happens.

Ok, now I see where I was stuck. But it's still really hard to practice it without the constant trap of concepts and sneaky thoughts Thanks for the explanation.

Yeah, you are right, I focus more on being conscious than on inquiring itself. But I still call it self inquiry because I do it to get a "feeling" of who I really am, by silencing my sense of identity. My end goal is to find out who is really Being Present.

I'm still new and conceptualizing is an easy trap for me

Yeah, I try to avoid the theoretical mode, because it traps me into monkey mind. That's also why I don't use "verbal" self inquiry. I mean... I don't use the questions like "Who am I"? I just sit in silence after meditation and observe reality and my feelings to try to "feel" my Consciousness. Sometimes what happens is that my bodily sensations become distant, like my body is some kind of movie character, and sometimes I get absorbed by the scenery I am seeing, like I become partially connected to the moon/sky/horizon etc and lose a small sense of "human identity". I don't know if it's the right way to do it, but I'm doing it this way because I feel like it's a lot easier to merge with awareness with this method, for me. The verbal questions get me distracted by monkey mind, so I prefer to use this meditative state of "forgetting my identity".

Do you mean that I shouldn't conceptualize what happens to me on self inquiry? P.S.: are the practices I'm using correct? It's hard to understand if I'm doing it right, since you get such a tiny feedback from the inquiry