LastThursday

Notice how the bliss lasts a little bit after you wake up. Keep extending the bliss, a little bit longer each morning, hold on to it, how would you do that? Practice. That bliss is a message.

@vanish Hang on a minute. To awaken presuposes that you're asleep - a.k.a. having a dream. But unless you've awakened before, how would you know you're asleep and that it is actually possible to awaken? How can you trust anyone else's word for it - they're just dream characters? And anyway, where's the 100% certainty that you will awaken INTO something else? And to be honest how do you know this is the same dream every day? Maybe you're awakening all the time? Just chewing the fat...

@vanish @Leo Gura I apologise for being confused. I thought you meant physically die, but actually you meant physically die. I also thought you meant enlightenment when you actually meant awakenment.

How do we know he hasn't already? You don't know that. Nobody does. Maybe you will become enlightened, maybe it will just be another dream. This dream is just a dream, but you gotta admit it's a fucking awesome experience? And just maybe you can be enlightened AND enjoy the dream. Anyway, read this, it makes a good analogy for your situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager

I've taken on board 5-Leo-Dmt's teachings (I love him BTW. But non-sexually I hasten to add). So. I'm living in a dream. The thoughts that occurred to me, are many-fold. Firsty: am I living one dream at a time? Secondly: if no, what is it like to live more than one dream simultaneously? Thirdly: exactly how many dreams am I living at once? Fourthly: does one dream influence the other? These are my basic conclusions: I live in three dreams. 1. The dream of the ever present NOW. This is the world of of sensation, colours, and lights and sounds and feelings and and and... 2. The dream of the thought. The world of concepts and constructions and rationalization. Monkey Mind. Ego. 3. The dream of night dreams. Spurious situations and weird incoherent happenings whilst I'm in bed. So what about it? It seems to me like dream 1 is sort of like Enlightenment, pure, unadulterated; without judgement, bias, etc. Dream 2, is permanence. It's what give the world substance, memory, recognition, structure, this sensation begat this other sensation. Dream 3, is fluid, little thought, very much like dream 1, but less intense, more ephemeral, beautiful, calm, easy. It appears then that Dream 2 is the bully. It sprays itself over the other dreams and pretends to be King. 'I am dream 2' it declares. Dream 1 doesn't care, it asserts itself as much as it can and goads Dream2 into its fantasies. And Dream 2 ensures that Dream 1 comes back day after day. OMG, I've had this dream before, it's sooo familiar. Dream 3 is completely free and cares not about the other two. Except it's too flaky and gives everything up to the other two at a moment's notice. However. Dream 3 is where it's at. That's where the peace is at. Is there a dream 4?

@deci belle sorry, I hope no offence was taken by my reply in any way - in fact I hope it's the opposite - I appreciate your response. I can be somewhat blunt or sarcastic, but mean no harm. I guess it's easy to say "don't use mental models" to achieve enlightenment, but in practice this is a difficult thing to do (for me anyway). I suppose meditation and other practices are ways around this problem. My particular way to go about things is to build up a mental model and then knock it down, by a kind of reductio ad absurdum. I reckon if I do this enough times, something will eventually go pop. So fire away! This is exactly the response I like. With regards to my three dream model (3DM), I can see both sides. Firstly, it's as ridiculous as saying my body is composed of three things: limbs, torso, head. Well... yes it is, but that's not really my body. My body is a single entity (from a materialist standpoint) and hence can't be divided. So as for 3DM: I pretend there's parts to my awareness (whatever that is) only so that I can eventually discover it's actually indivisible. So how to prove my model is ridiculous? Here goes: There's a kind of 'flow' between the dreams. Dream #2 is clearly influenced by dream #1, thoughts often revolve around what's happening now, I miss the bus, I thing angry thoughts. Dream #3 also seems to often have elements of dream #1, familiar faces, places and situations and sensations. Dream #3 also often affects dream #2 especially on waking up and may even put you in a bad mood with negative thoughts. Dream #2 also greatly affects what you experience in dream #1. You decided to take a vacation abroad and hey, everything's different! So clearly there's an interplay between the different dreams in all directions. This already smells. It's hard for something to be separate, if it commingles with other things. This is why entanglement in quantum theory actually breaks the materialist paradigm. QED. By the way, this is why I often think that expunging thought from enlightenment is like proving the body is indivisible by cutting an arm off. But slowly slowly the impression I'm getting is that enlightenment, is actually inconceivable by my present self.

Just do any boring task. In my experience time goes very slowly. I find meditating 10 minutes, seems like three days. Note: that is neither a good thing or a bad thing - phew.

This is terse: Thanks . Dream #3 followed by dream #1 and then dream #2 will answer tomorrow.

I don't know about psychadelics. But honestly, what is insanity? Non-conformity, inconsistency, irrationality? What else? Is it good or is it evil? Can you embrace it, or is it too weird and scary?

Life is a like a dance. You foxtrot with some and salsa with others. And eventually you realise every step is a joy. But it doesn't come easy. EDIT Obviously, that's the soundbite answer. I'm I awakened? Probably not. But one realisation that I've applied is that neither the past nor the future can touch or hurt me (they're illusory). There's a great freedom in this if you can fully embrace it. It involves great a mental practice of 'letting go' and 'letting things be'. If you can just not grip on to things so tightly, life becomes a great deal easier and less painful.

5-Leo-DMT ahahaha soo sorry ahahhahaha

Bingo. You are the one dream that rules them all. Those three dreams are bullshit. They vie for your attention, but you are not the dreams. What are you?

Can consciousness be captured inside a machine? To a certain extent, yes. We watch TV, play computer games and listen to music. And we can escape into those media. What exactly about conciousness can be captured? Well, a computer is all numbers. Numbers are ordered into a one dimensional number line. But computers can reproduce sights and sounds and even touch. What's the common element between all these computery happenings? Intensity. That's what allows computers to reproduce a slice of reality. They encode a slice of 'reality' by using a sliding scale of intensity. The insensity can be anything, from 'black' to 'bright red' or 'silent' to very loud 'drum beat'. Take a moment and think about why computers are so good at reproducing reality. Why do you get completely absorbed in a TV programme or computer game or pornography? What about our ordinary concious happenings is so special that it can be captured and re-played? What is it exactly?

Did you know that the crescent of the moon always points towards the sun? But if not for the sun, the moon would be invisible. And likewise you are the sun that illuminates the world and the whole world always points towards you.

My two cents: I would be a different person everyday and throw away the old me when I sleep.

Intelligence is just like enlightenment, if you truly have it, you either don't realise you have it, or you don't brag about it, because it's nothing special.

And for emphasis: and a lot of other kinds of suffering.

It's actually a bluff to give your conceptual mind occupied - sugar for the mind. But you've managed to see through the bluff, amazing. The idea is to keep the conceptual mind occupied so that it gets out of the way of your authentic self - the authentic self is happy and confident. Normally your conceptual mind likes to sabotage the real you via all kinds of negativity and perhaps cripling self doubt and insecurity. As you've identified, it can backfire because the conceptual mind is sneaky enough to find ways to sabotage the success, and one way it does this is to compare things; so you get things like 'that guy is stronger than me', 'that person is more beautiful than me' or even 'I've failed to live up to my amazing self image'. It's all bs of course, because in reality people can't be compared to each other in any way, every single person is unique - and that amazing self image is a mirage.

And Leo has presented plenty of 'proof' in his videos. Ironically, it's not scientific proof I grant you. But a talking head can only do so much. He advocates that you do the 'experiments' yourself and not just trust his word. No. It constitutes evidence against dogma. Your argument against 'living in a dream' is done by asserting that science and materialism are true. But how can you trust that truth if there's even one iota of doubt? It's a matter of perspective. On the scientific/materialist side: Your subjective experience is not to be trusted, because the 'real world' is 'out there'. To reduce self bias (delusion), experiments are carried out by many different people. marks (mappings) are made, and those people agree amongst themselves that those marks constitute reality, by building conceptual frameworks which are themselves just made of words, thoughts, speech, arrangements of marks (mathematics) etc. For a scientist the map is the territory. On the spiritualist/idealist/dream side: Your direct experience (a.k.a. subjective) is the only thing to be trusted. To reduce delusion (self bias), you strip away the equivalences between appearances (experiences or perceptions or qualia). In other words thoughts, words and other forms of indirection (pointing) are not reality. Basically, the word 'dog' is not a dog, only the direct experience of a dog is a dog - so the map is not the territory. It says the ego is a sham, because it's a mapping onto itself, like two arrows pointing to each other. Like the definition of 'Recursion' in a dictionary saying 'see Recursion'. It's self supporting, but groundless, a map without a territory. It then goes deeper by saying that even the appearences are delusion, because there are really no boundaries between them and they're in constant flux in any case, they can't be 'caught' and examined. So you are not your ego and you are not your appearences. So if even appearences are delusion, then what exactly is left? Nada, zip, nothing. Nothing exists. You don't exist. Everything you think you experience is a dream.

I know, it seems absurd. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What's realistic is based on what, you personally, have experienced so far to be real. And what you've experienced so far is only available in your memories, and science tells us memories are unreliable. And the reports of people around us are unreliable, people lie and manipulate. And the laws of physics are constantly changing and being revised (is Gravity Newtonian or is it the bending of spacetime? Is light a particle or a probability wave or electomagnetism?). What I'm getting at, is that you can trust nothing, and anything you do trust you ought to be very suspicious of. That's the scientific method.

That's a great question. Why doesn't it? I would really really question that. A good place to start is this: what has changed over the course of your life? Is there any one thing that has stayed rock-steady constant and unchanging throughout that time? Is there anything that hasn't fallen apart?

Before I started to learn about spirituality I had been depressed for quite a number of years. Despite the depression I've always been able to do one thing very well, and that was program computers - it's my profession. As you might imagine this takes prolonged periods of focus and a certain amount of motivation. One of the reasons I stumbled into spirituality was to stop the suffering of my depression and to understand myself better. I realised at some point that what was causing me a lot of suffering was negative self talk, and I set out to kill it - it took an immense amount of daily practice. Another problem was an almost constant level of anxiety about almost everything. One way or another I've come out of my depression and conquered both problems. In the past few months however I'm having the exact opposite problem. I often go for long periods without any self talk whatsoever, and I'm not anxious about anything at all, not even being fired from work. This seems to have affected my ability to both think in a focussed way (my mind goes blank regularly or I loose the thread of my thoughts), and I have no particular motivation from fear of losing my job. Result: no productivity at work. Any thoughts on what's going on here? If I keep on the spiritual path, I feel it's only going to get worse!

Thank you. I guess that's the fear that I know deep down I'm going to have to face. I will need to be both authentic and true to myself and survive too, otherwise life carries on being mediocre. However I'm in a deep tar pit of inertia: well paid job, easy commute, mastery in my field, no debt, no ties and so on. Pulling myself out of the tar pit is going to take suffering and lots of time, naturally it's difficult to engage meaningfully with this. Good question! Nothing that involves being subject to the whims of anyone else. In other words would I have to completely own my work, ideas, way of working, without interferrence. As to the 'what' thats wide open, in fact so wide I can't get a mental handle on it. My hope in some way, is if I can dissolve my ego enough, I can get past the inertia by just flowing or gravitating into my preferred way of living. Anyway, thanks, it's good to splurge it out in writing. Maybe that's the trick?

A journey is not a journey without change, look out of the window and enjoy the scenery. Before you were interested, now you're disinterested, next you're...

The supermarket set out to poison you, you just chose not to pay for it twice.