Bird

@cirkussmile @Bend_and_Sway Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts ☺️

Just out of curiosity I'd like to know if anyone can label or tell me what I experienced a while ago. TL;DR: Read the bold. Since I was 8 I questioned death, what it meant, how it'd feel. It wasn't until the teens that I got a sense that I would die. This evolved in the later teens and early twenties into realizing that "existence would end", as I would tell myself. That life would go into an infinite, super fast forward the moment I die. I went from having episodes of realizing I was gonna die from once every few months, to every week, to almost every night. Every time I'd get a chilling sensation on the back of my head or spine at the neck, then my whole head, and just REALLY feel I would die. I would just flip in the bed, or scratch the walls if standing, thinking in desperation "no, no, this can't happen, it can't end, oh god, oh god, my body, my life, my memories, all for what? It can't all end". I would be very much aware that me, the earth, the sun, everything would end. I was specially spooked at realizing/feeling that "existence" would end. Finally one night I had this feeling so deep that I went in this dimension where there was nothing. I felt infinitely, terrifyingly alone. I thought "my parents can't even help me" because there was no one to ask for help. They aren't there, they don't exist in there. There isn't a thing. It's no existence. After I snapped out of it, I can't remember clearly what went next, since I probably fell asleep shortly after in exhaustion. I do remember though that I pretty much decided that death wasn't a problem I could solve. After 10-20 years of thinking about it and REALLY trying to figure a way to escape death, I gave up. Giving up is not something I used to do at all, ever. Not an option for anything in life until then. Weeks or months after that, together with teachings and meditation (which were ongoing in the last years of while experiencing this), I started to surrender everything. My entrepreneurial goals from my childhood. Goals in general to live a life. My pride for knowledge and skills. Needing a relationship. Nice to haves at best, but not musts. These were the biggest foundations of my identification with the self and in a matter of months I've dropped the biggest chunks. Once in a while I find a smaller one and I drop it too. I now accept things don't go my ego's way. I am just observing. I get sucked in once in a while but snap out of it shortly after. Big emotional episodes, like a special other crying helplessly next to me, does not really suck me in. I remain unaffected, but not uncaring. I am present there with love and understanding for what they are going through. I have greater patience. I know things happen for a reason and will continue to do so, and I don't need to get involved emotionally - it's pointless. It's just "the story" as some teachers call it. From the outside the feedback is that I look way more calm ("on weed" said one person, never tried though so can't compare) and very kind. My ego dissolves without effort. I sometimes call it the unstoppable force that is bulldozing through my ego, to the few I can speak of this, but can't give me insights about. I can't label this, but it looks like a kind of dark night of the soul. I also wondered if because I kind of "shrugged death off", I missed my chance to enlightenment. I just wonder now. I tried to recreate it to "truly face death" and I can't seem to go there anymore. Deep inside I feel if enlightenment will happen then it will, I am not really seeking it. But just for fun I wonder: if I knew how to surrender to death, instead of resisting back then, could that have been a gateway to the so much talked about enlightenment?

These are minor sensations but that made me wonder later on what they are. Maybe someone here knows what these are and have an explanation or something. 1. While meditating, I sensed as if there was a slight tension on my forehead. As an ethereal finger would pull my skin upwards thus causing the tension, but no sensation of touch. The interesting bit is that as I slowly tilted my head up or down or sideways, this sensation would “stay in the same location spatially speaking”, so tilting my head up would make this sensation occur on my nose instead. Tilting towards the right had the sensation be felt on the left side of my forehead, and so on. This part really had me ponder as opposed to just thinking “it’s a muscular spasm or something”, since it wasn’t linked to any muscle. 2. This wasn’t during meditation but in bed at night after turning the lights off. Happened when I was small, less often after that, and now again. I have a feeling as if everything was gigantic. Huge. The bed. The room. The objects in it. Me. But at the same time everything feels the same scale and proportionally normal. Just that it all feels huge, as a giant living in a giant house with no real point of reference that things are indeed huge. Opening my eyes and looking around reduces this sensation. Closing my eyes intensifies. It can go on for many minutes, maybe 10-15. Im just curious what these could be. I can’t think of many places I could ask around so here it is. Thank you for your time!

Thank you all for the input, it’s nice to get some pointers. Ill try to bear this in mind next time whenever that is and see how it goes. I get the quicksand reference. I’ve noticed that by surrendering more and more you go deeper and deeper, almost effortlessly. If anyone has any more insights, please go ahead. This is all very interesting.

Sorry, couldn't find a better place to this without disrupting a subforum topic. I really like listening to Actualized.org on Podcasts (iTunes that is) since YouTube is not great for audio only, and I don't want to get YouTube Red. That said, Podcasts haven't been updated since "Metaphysical Implications Of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - Part 1" (March 26). I've been waiting patiently but I am thinking maybe this channel might not be updated anymore, so I wanted a confirmation to either wait or move on. Thanks!

Los Angeles!

@InkPop thanks for the response. It would seem that I can still search for the Show and manually add the episodes. When I hit Subscribe it does nothing. Well I guess the ball is on Apple’s side.

I'd like to share my experiences. I've done this 4 times this week. First time Did it for 30-60 minutes. I think I was breathing wrong because I didn't feel much except some tingling. Second time Did it for 60-90 minutes. This time it got deeper, I felt a lot of pain everywhere as if I was releasing a lot of hidden pain. I went running a bit that morning and I felt a bit of pain from the muscle tissues involved in the running, but also the diaphragm. I heard a noise, not so much of that high pitch sound you hear when you go from a noisy to silent room, but instead more like a sound with increasing reverb. I shook my head to stop it, I got a bit scared. By the end of it I started to slowly go back to normal breathing, and waited up until everything went back to normal. On the meantime I couldn't move my hands at all, while arms, and to some extent legs, with some difficulty. I took a long, deep, beautiful breathe before sitting up and it felt like I've never breathed this effortlessly since I was a kid. Third time I forget. Did I do it that day or not? I am confident I did but I have no memory of it. Should have taken notes daily instead of waiting until now. Fourth time This one got me scared. I went deeper with the breathing, as if I was trying to relax my body on every exhalation. Before the 45 minute mark I was breathing and half crying with every exhalation. It felt like I was getting something out there which I thought at the moment it was going to help me a lot, so I kept trying to look for it. By the 45 minute mark my hands were in too much pain from being completely curled, thumbs inwards, other fingers closed, but specially my left hand small finger completely stretched out. On top of that, I suddenly hear my Mac do the booting sound twice and I panicked: is this coming from my head? why is my Mac restarting? Why is it restarting twice immediately?! I promptly ceased to breathe like this and started to use my nose, trying to use a more slower paced breathing, like I'd do when meditating. At some point I felt really bad so I immediately went back to breathing with my mouth open but slowly and less deeply. Part of me was fearing that "I would stay like this forever" and the other part was like "psh this is absurd, it's just like when your leg falls asleep, we've been through this hundred of times by now". Still I panicked I couldn't move, and I kept repeating myself "It's going to be okay. This is just a moment..." and the such over and over. After this I still have my hands shaking. Not sure what I can say about this, other than it's clear that I am always scared and this proves it. Another reason why I can't do psychedelics - I'm just too scared of anything that pulls me out of normal - and can't figure out exactly why. Conclusion I might give it another shot in the near future. For the time being, after trying so many different things, what I like the most is just calming my mind and be still. I'm just aware that alone might not be enough, so I'm always on the lookout for something now.