tsuki

@How to be wise It's okay. Do you mind explaining why do you assert that?

@Hotaka As I go again and again through your posts here, I notice that it is very difficult to read them. I missed a lot of depth in your posts in my responses from yesterday. Sorry about that. I would appreciate if you broke your responses up into paragraphs in the future. Other than that, your words resonate with me a lot. Would you mind sharing your own experience?

So, there's been this feeling of spaciousness behind my eyes, 'inside', while I meditate. At first, it was difficult to attain and after some practice, it came easily. Now it manifests itself on its own. At first, I was describing it as 'pressure', or 'tension', but I really like to call it spaciousness. It's a feeling that bears similarity to inhaling deeply. With 'lungs'/'chest' however it has limited capacity and there is a point after no more 'air' comes in. Spaciousness in forehead during meditation is more like constant, never-ending inhalation/expansion. There are actually two 'places' in which it manifests - both inside of my head, 'behind' my eyes. It first appeared somewhere directly over my eyes, centered. Now it 'sits' on top of my head, or on the back of my head. There was a point when I could move it from one place to the other and it felt as if it was going through a small pipe, or a straw. It is not focused, like touch for example, but more blurred. Radiating over the whole inside of my head. Like spaciousness of breath is blurred over lungs. As I'm writing this post I came to realization that I can extend the area over which I can feel it, but to some degree. I was wondering if it's possible to extend it over the whole 'inside' of my body and I was able to do it to some degree, but felt resistance. I know that all of this sounds weird, but do you had any experience with this kind of phenomenon? Does this description fit into any framework of growth that you know and I can work with?

Emptying your mind can lead to reconnection with the world through physical body, like @Quanty suggests. Going through transition of perspective can be pretty traumatic though, so I'm not sure how that would interact with the depressed mind.

Bliss/joy/peace are one experience for me. From one point of view, it is calmness/stillness. The emotional pond is still, without anger/fear/guilt/shame, etc. From another point of view, the peace is blissful. It is a feeling of being completely dead inside, like nothing would ever move me. It is a pleasant feeling! I do feel emotions, but because the pond is mostly still, I can easily identify and direct them. They are not negative, but neutral. This redirection from, lets say, anger to negative thoughts is conditioned into movement that reinterprets the experience into something more positive. There is a tension during aggravating moments, but this tension is internally resolved through equalization in thoughts. Feelings are being let go, automatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

@Hotaka I don't know. Let's see if you can relate: I always come out of thought into the crown, or third eye. From there I can shift between the two down to the throat and no further. It is stuck at the throat and if I leave it there, it silences the mind. It feels like a blockage, because I cannot move it down below to other areas. It can also be interpreted as an excitement of the throat because of a constant flow downwards. It doesn't seem to be directed towards anything below. As if the capacity of spaciousness of the chest was too great to be filled with this flow. When I let the crown go through the throat, I can simultaneously focus on the breath. With the throat active, as I exhale, I can 'pump' the spaciousness through my spine downward, towards the root (anus?). As i do this, I feel pleasant vibrations throughout the spine. It feels as if the space reached the root and reversed, shooting upwards. I wonder if I can reach the heart this way, or there needs to be a third movement, irrespective of the throat and breath. At the early stages of my meditation practice, I felt two movements of this space that I can relate to now. Both felt as if I was a superconductor for the space. One was like the space shifted through me downwards. It felt as if I was infinitely heavy. Pinned down to the ground. It did not even occur to me to move in this state. It was like I was eternal, like the space itself. My whole body, every inch of it, became aware of the movement down. The other experience was when the space moved upwards. It felt then, as if I was weightless. As if my body didn't exist. This body feels like a gland of the space, yes. It is a way to pump it. It feels as if I was an organ within the cosmic body that influences this space. The cosmic body being me. It is not something other/alien, but me. I can shift from the mind-perspective into the body-perspective that I just described. I have come here by developing the mind-perspective to the point in which it became similar to the spaciousness. This is how it was possible to me to cross the body-mind barrier. This barrier is what I call the identity. Psychology operates on this boundary, where the mind and the body meet. Yes. Everything about me is arbitrary now. The self-story is a matter of choice. It all became an intertwined mess of events with no apparent causality. I don't see auras per se, but I can recognize forms of energy in non-scientific terms. People seem to have problems with funneling some forms of energy into other. Like connection with people into money, or money into understanding. We're too heavily grounded in objective perspective and cannot deal with money properly. It stagnates and builds up. I haven't thought about the space-time correspondence in-depth yet. From the body perspective, everything is here and now. There is no time in this domain. I think that you will find this graph useful:

@MarkusSweden From my point of view, material reality is perspective-independent. You can apply many perspectives on top of it and you will get different results depending on the definition of the current perspective. When your mind becomes open enough so that you do not fear ambiguity, you can inspect your models of reality closely to see that they are, in fact, hollow. Words have many different meanings and if you do not inspect them, you may run into a trap of thinking that your models are reality. The moment that you think that something is obvious is the moment that you missed your judgement. The same reasoning applies to prediction of people's motivation. People do hings for all kinds of reasons and assuming upfront that they are stupid is the expression of your model of society. You should learn your own stupidity, so that the word 'stupid' becomes emotionally neutral. It has to stops meaning 'the other person'. Learning all of the wicked sides of your personality is a very potent equalizer of judgement. There is no such thing as collective unconscious in reality. Perhaps I have not yet awakened to the degree you have been describing. This is why material world has to be perspective-neutral. The state of consciousness cannot be something externally observable. This is why spiral dynamics is cyclic. There is no way to tell from your perspective whether somebody else is lower or higher than you. You can only tell whether they are on even, or on odd stage (with respect to you), but never if they are lower or higher. The world is relative to perspective you have and perspectives are disjoint. I think that judgement of others is self-miscommunication. A lack of mastery of the mind. Unfortunate, but common. Not perfect, but essentially unknowable. Saying something about somebody else is an expression of your understanding of the world. Negative judgement is an expression of misaligned perspectives. I do. This is a clue however. The one-eyedness is the reason of ambiguity. Instead of saying that it is a flaw, embrace it to become free. True freedom lies in perfect balance. Not a balance on top of a mountain so that a small wind tips you over to fall. It is a balance in a valley. A beach ball does not care for storm, as it is all the same to it which direction is up and which is down. It is not stable, nor unstable. It is a neutral balance. (See the article)

It is fascinating how various cultures came to this realization through the breath into various areas of the body. I seem to have broke through the mind, increasing the frequency of thoughts so that they become more similar to other bodily sensations. I can see how stilling the mind with meditation can be a different approach. Making it silent so that it focuses on the body.

I am not gathering knowledge, but exploring structure. I am aware that words are empty and it is a matter of choice, or habit to connect them to certain phenomena. What I am interested in is exploring the structure, or relationships within a theory and map it onto my experience to see what it predicts. I am not gathering facts. This is what science misses and remains silent with respect to the inner work. Funny, how just a new hours ago I thought that my spaciousness is being blocked at the throat. Then, I started to think that it is not a blockage, but a constant flow downwards. A release of the pressure from the crown. Then, it seemed like the empty space of my chest was so vast that no amount of channeling from the crown would fill it. Now, I can see that the fact that I linked the spaciousness of the head with the chest was not accidental. Chest is a pump of its own, drawing space from the 'outside'. I did an interesting experiment. As I channeled the space through my throat, I stopped breathing. It seems that the body was more relaxed with respect to oxygen deprivation. I will do more tests when I will get back home. Got some work to do.

I described something like this in my other thread. Can you relate to this experience? Try to be open-minded about it. What we call spaciousness may not be the same thing, after all. What's important here is the structure, not the content. How you can interact between the parts of your body. The inner touch is an interesting way to put it. It is an interesting idea to link this with scientific knowledge about our body. Do you think that inner touch of different areas of the body is a way to influence its operation?

I don't think that it is caused by meditation per se. I just started to notice it and made connection with various other phenomena. Meditation simply opened space for me to explore it and notice new things. It is a temporary silence in which you can notice things. Chakras are a model between domains. It is a bridge between the body and the mind, so that you can build an image of bodymind. It is not that chakras cause thinking, or thinking causes chakras. They coexist at the same time. Think of it as this: language is thinking from the point of mind. Chakra is thinking from the point of view body. Model is a pointer so that you can link and correlate the two. They are the same thing described from two perspectives. It is like saying that a person is a set of cells. That is a point of view of biology. From the point of view of sociology, a person is a cell that builds society. Knowing both perspectives lets you influence both levels, but it is not that one level is in control of the other. Society is made of people, and people are made by society (culture).

@Dogsbestfriend I can definitely relate to what you are saying. I always used to notice it at the third eye just before going to sleep and have vivid, sometimes even lucid dreams. Ever since it sits on the crown, I practically have no dreams - or at least not the imaginative ones. It sometimes feels like I've been thinking the whole night in an alert state, but I still 'wake up' well-rested. Today I linked the lower points with emotions. Physical fear focuses somewhere below lungs for me. I'll have to notice where is anger located the next time I get the chance. Ever since the spaciousness rests at the crown, I rarely get angry. Ever since I was a child, I could focus something at my hands. I used to play that it is some kind of superpower, but I never found any use for it. I can still do it and there is some quality similar to the spaciousness to it. When I focus on it, it feels somewhat colder than the crown, but the coldness is irrespective of the temperature that I touch. Very strange. How do you let the energy out of the crown with your hands?

What are the effects of imbalance? What is the importance of being able to move the energy through the spine?

That's what I'm suspecting. I can move and 'split' this spaciousness over the top of my head to the third eye and down to throat. I sometimes were able to go down past the throat, but it's difficult. It's like there is so much of it at the top, that it would take me ages. I see it now as a means to connect the mental and the bodily domain into one dimension. The bodymind. Let's see where it'll take me.

@MarkusSweden I will reply to your post tomorrow. It's getting late, gotta get some sleep .

First time I noticed it was when I started to meditate. I had always used (?) this spaciousness as I was trying to go to sleep and it was strange that it manifested itself during meditation. I thought that I was sleepy hahaha. It was only the above the eyes sensation, though. Never the top of the head. After some observation, it started to manifest in the waking hours, spontaneously. It became intertwined with meditation somehow and this is how I began to meditate effortlessly. It's 'on' all the time these days. I don't pay too much attention to it anymore. Just curious. I thought that I was squint my eyes during sleeping, hahaha. So funny. It's an eclipse in inverse colors to match the forum layout. A beautiful, natural manifestation of nonduality. An added bonus is that tsuki is moon in Japanese.

For me, cultivation is not a word that I would use. It is anticipation for growth to manifest itself. But I see your point. You cannot make yourself grow with thought, as I understood it.

Because I recognize that what was called thought is a part of me that is equal to other parts that are in balance. None is more important than other. Thought stays in motion, but to say that thought guides my action is like saying that a car that drives by guides my action. It doesn't make sense. If there is anything that drives me, it is something from beyond thought. It is something that I am yet to explore to arrive at stillness. I feel like a newborn that starts to speak. The drive to explore is insatiable. I can see thought as a loop that reinforces its own movement, interacting with things that I previously saw as residing in different categories. Thought is like a ruler that you can measure things with at different scales. It has no substance of its own. It is of no interest for me and I let it do its own thing. By treating various, disjoint, categories of existence as equivalent, and being open for thought to manifest a pattern with a model with sufficient ambiguity.

It does not imply time. It is not movement of fear. Thought is mechanical in nature and it flows by itself. I had a period of being driven by thought, but now I am separate from it. I let it go its own way. For now, it is occupied with growth. It reorganizes itself. It feels as if the world shifts and warps around me. Thought and insight go hand in hand, mechanically. Thought acquired a new dimension, not predicated on fear. It has to run its course to become still once more. I won't be getting in its way. Bear in mind that we may be talking about two different things, friend. I may have not yet reached you, or you may have not yet reached me. There is no way to tell.

As generosity of interpretation I mean - extend your definitions of negative traits in such a way that they feel justified. Not, as justification in a sense of being weak and explaining yourself to authority, but genuinely justified. In what cases anger is justified? In what cases gossip is justified? Gossip is annoying in a sense that it tries to build trust on the expense of another person. Perceptive people understand that a person that engages in gossip will also gossip about the person they talk with. That is a method of building trust by undermining it. Ambiguity about gossip comes from the fact that you never know whether the person actually tells the truth or just makes shit up to sound knowledgeable about others. There is no way to tell lies from truth about other people, even if everybody talks the same stupid shit. Everybody could be repeating lies, for that matter. If this is not a reliable way to spread information then why do you care? Well, you care because of your reputation. You are trying to look good so that your work is appreciated by the higher-ups. After all, your career may crash if somebody said something stupid about you to your boss. But is this really the case? He is your boss, after all. He's been through this himself and is probably a veteran of gossip, so why would you think that he can't see what you see about gossip? Is it perhaps that you think that your boss is stupid yourself? Well then - perhaps people that talk shit about your boss behind his back think the same way you do? Perhaps they really think and mean what they say? Not in a malicious way, but are genuinely saying what bothers them about other people? That they are looking for connection with others because of fear of other people? That they are trying to gain your trust to open up, but you're actually being close-minded and judgmental? That all people are really pissed off by other people's gossip and cannot see that they engage in it? Because what are you doing right now? Talking shit about your workplace out of genuine concern for your well-being. Looking for connection with others! Gossip is not a strategy. You make other people gossip by judging them for what they say. This judgement then prevents you from genuinely listening to other people. Because what they say about others is an expression of their existence. Their understanding of others, however annoying it is, is them. You are the one that makes people into liars by judging their words. There is no way to tell truth from lies in a practical situation. All language is deeply ambiguous. TL;DR: the effect of making a model ambiguous is to produce disinterest. So that it does not trigger you. There is only one principle: benevolence that is not assumed, but seen. If you're asking about my teachers, I had none. I used to listen to Allan Watts a lot, but not anymore. These are observations from my everyday experience.

@MarkusSweden Perception of your surroundings is dependent on the degree in which you embody enlightenment/growth. Your model of growth that you habitually use to judge others is too constrained. You need to make it more ambiguous to be more generous with your interpretations of others' behavior.

@7thLetter Think of the mind as a pattern-matching device. As you experience things in your life, you spot things that recur in relation to your current knowledge. The problem with the mind is that it matches incomplete patterns. It does not yet see the limitations of patterns it tries to capture, and applies them to observable phenomena. An incomplete pattern that is being followed is mistaken for something that ought to happen. A likely prediction. When it comes to childhood trauma, the mind captures patterns of human behavior that it tries to understand. If you do not work through your childhood trauma and go about your life, you will match incomplete, imperfect patterns that result in a very miserable life. Just imagine if everything you did was in relation to fear of being hurt (physically or emotionally). You need to explore various routes through emotional kaleidoscope to get rid of patterns that always end up in someone being hurt. You need to make your patterns ambiguous enough to be free to choose different approaches. You will never get rid of all patterns unless you become enlightened, but as you experience more and more circumstances, the mind will give you openings in which you will be able to see things clearly. This is why you need to keep being open-minded about things and stop judging others for what they do. Judgement is the result of pattern-matching and it occurs in various dimensions of reality (emotional, kinesthetic, conceptual, etc).

@The Don Orange has its limitations because it sees no alternative approaches to solving problems that it perceives. We came out of the stone age not by disowning stones, but by seeing them as something that is basically the same as other things. We still use stones when we see them as appropriate. For building roads, for example. Just imagine a society in which science is as common and uninteresting as stones in modern times. A society in which science is so incorporated into the fabric of existence that you don't even think scientifically anymore. Science as raw material in which you build tools to solve problems. This is what we can achieve when we transcend orange.