Bill Eichman

@Truth If this board software had a 'Like' function I would like Truth's answers. I think that there is greater complexity to the polarity realities we find within and outside of ourselves, but he describes the one that is most important to use in the intimate man-woman dynamic very well and usefully.

You can have both. The power of attention is the key. If I were you, at your age, I would probably use two things. The first would be to pick a physical context in which you tell yourself "This is the place and time for my minds to twist back up into funny mode and create jokes and work on my performance. In this place I intentionally go wild." The second would be to use some memory triggers to help anchor the ability to open and close that type of creativity at will. A chant, mantra, or triggering keywords, a physical movement (think yoga - but active, or martial arts. Maybe something like what you do to greet the crowd? Or something with elements like what you do to meet the crowd. but also distinctly different. I have done similar things. They worked for me. After a while you will find you've built a new attention infrastructure, and you won't need any of those aids anymore, you will just have the ability to move back and forth. Like Victor says, the type of meditation you are practicing has an effect on such things. And, the longer you practice ANY kind of mediation. the stronger it's side effects and additional effects become. This works a lot like physical exercise. You become stronger in general in terms of the functions of mind and attention. That general increase of strength has many wonderful effects, and by itself would probably solve many of the issues you describe, or at least improve them.

My advice on this might go over like a lead balloon. But it is based on many years of long lasting relationships, two marriages, the second lasting 30 years and still a treasure, more long term relatoionships, and dealing with my own jealousies, and helping others with theirs. This especially applies to your situation, since, as you say, you had a rigid upbringing. Here's the advice. Make a point of studying sex and women, especially how to send the signals that turn a woman on. And deliberately bring your sexual studies to bed with your new wife, and have steadily hotter sex with her over the next months and years. You will bond her sexually to you. You will write over the rigidity of your upbringing, which is likely to be fairly sex-negative and repressed, with direct body knowledge of who you are, what you have done, and what you can do. And you will build your own sexual confidence and sense of sexual manhood. Write a new positive sexual story between the two of you.

How does this work? Where is the complexity? Where is the mind? And how would you demonstrate this?

It's a very good idea to try to absorb the ideas and the reported experiences of several to many teachers if you can. If one was learning something like how to program or how to practice surgery or how to manage a company, it would be unthinkable in modern times not to try to get as broad a base of experience possible. To learn from many teachers, even while you have one mentor or one favorite teacher. To try to learn the newest techniques and ideas, because they are very likely to be extremely important, and to contain ideas and models that have been taken from hard experience and past failures. That's the modern model of learning. Learn from everything, combine teachings, keep what works, set aside what doesn't. But, the model of learning that is still associated with "enlightenment" is based on the much older model of apprenticeship. Loyalty to one school and one teacher is still an ideal, with each school claiming it is the right way and all other ways are wrong, and teachers claiming that mixing ways and methods will result in disaster. Yet none of them can point to examples of such disasters. Dire warnings without offering evidence. That is a sign of religion and politics, not a working system. If their system worked, its results would be clear and intensely attractive to seekers, and there would be no need for dire warnings not to mix systems. I write the above both as general perspective, and as an intro to the topic of astral projection. I suggest you make a point of studying astral projection as described by multiple teachers. There are several different types of projection, and different uses for it. And almost all modern talk of astral projection has its origins in one of just a few sources. You would want to read the three Robert Monroe books, for example. They are the source of most modern projection ideas. It's especially important to read the third book after reading the first two. In the third book he says truly revolutionary things. Yet few people read it. I think I should point out to you that astral projection does not disconnect consciousness from the body. No one who has ever reported an astral projection experience did not have a body. When you have them, you will still have a body. You will return to that body and use it if you ever tell anyone the story of that experience. Astral projection is not what people think. Oddly, when people experience that for themselves, they often stop exploring it and miss out on discovering what can be done with it. It's like throwing away a supercomputer because you expected a flying machine.

Waiting is good advice. There is a consistent message that you'll find all over the planet, in every system I have studied. That message is, a person should be deeply experienced in life, and have developed themselves as a whole adult, before they seek liberation. Whole adults have the best chance of success, and the best chance of handling the results. People have the idea that "enlightenment" solves problems. It doesn't. You see problems differently, and you may be able to let some go, or use the minds that come along with the enlightenment package to more quickly deal with a problem. But real and inherent problems will still be real and inherent, and because you see and understand in a really astonishing new way, you will see that they are real and inherent, and must be borne. People also have the idea that enlightenment will confer special benefits. It doesn't, not in the sense that they mean. It gives you responsibilities, not benefits. Well, that's a big topic. Anyway, Leo gave you what I would say was good advice. However, you can continue to so self-development and enhance your minds, explore many things, and improve yourself as a human and person , and improve the speed and effectiveness at which you can do anything you like, by continuing with training. The training is valuable in a thousand ways. Those are all really good questions, the same ones I had. You have to keep in mind that each school's ideas are the product of their times. every school was trying to resolve some paradox or problem that was a really big deal for the people of that era, who all collectively believed such-and-such an idea from earlier generations. The way to resolve a troubling paradox is by telling a new story which includes a solution to the paradox in the structure of the story. That's what Adi Shankara, the person who wrote the first clearly Advaita texts..('A' meaning not, and 'dvaita' meaning two) in the 600s was doing. India had a thousand years of seeking moksha as a cultural foundation at that point, and a lot of religious conflict and class warfare came along with that. His ideas were seen as a breath of simplicity and as a way to share the benefits of vedanta more widely. it's a little cheesey to make the reference, but you could think of it as being similar to Luther starting protestant christianity by saying that everyone should have equal access to god, to be able to read the bible. Saying that there is really only brahman, you see, cuts out all the class and moral superiority thinking that was core to the vedas and upanishads, and to the idea of karma and rebirth that they taught as their foundation. That was the real benefit of advaita. It offers an escape from karma, as they understood karma at that time. Having that escape from the karma story was such a powerful benefit, that questions like "Why this appearance of separateness, then? What's the fucking point?" did not come up except among its critics, who were all high rank authorities who benefitted from being high rank in the competing religions. And obviously, they were assholes who 'just didn't get it'. As moderns I think we have a new obligation to look at the methods and ideas of the old systems with a much larger perspective than they had available to them, and we should take what looks like it works from anywhere we find it and then test it hard for practical usefullness. And we that should not be religious, and should carefully mark out the religious material, keep it around for art and culture, and watch in ourselves for signs of religious thinking.

@Paulus Amadeus You don't jump from perspective to perspective? I'm not sure I would like accepting that limitation. Have you considered the implications? It is your choice to make. I chose to consider everything as mine; not to pick a preference. So I do multiple perspectives. --- Like you, I'm a wise-ass. I see funny paradoxes in almost everything humans do and say, and writing about them makes me laugh. I wrote some funny stuff - you know it's funny if it references Tertullian and John of Patmos - then thought better of it, saved the writing for possible future use, and now I just wanted to ask this: --- Seriously, tho, why take a psychedelic to "try to see through" matter and energy? You don't appear to be refuting the method, but wanted to chide me for mentioning the irony of using matter to "see through" matter. Is it possible to use the psychedelics to see through "materialism"*? If it's possible, how does that work? *(I mark that word in quotes to indicate that we don't yet know if we share a similar definition of "materialism".)

He teaches the advaita union with brahman, which is in the class of moksha enlightenments, yes. He's using modern language and modern practices, I think. I have not yet studied this in detail. I want to remain in a state of unknowing for a bit longer, and directly experience what people are doing. From what I have gathered, he doesn't seem to emphasize the original language and theory, which is the realization that atman, the individual soul which survives death and is reborn, was always an illusion. there was always only brahman, ultimate self inhabiting ultimate reality, one and only one. Everything is already god, is a way of thinking about this. Always was, always will be, nothing but god. You are god, I am god. The appearance of not being god, and of being two seperate beings, is a mistake that god makes intentionally so that he/we can have the bliss of reunion. Advaita has a specific and interesting approach to the problem of liberation. It also has some specific problems, that sometimes are not noticed for quite a while. We are in seamless unity. What is, all that is, is god. If there is a million deaths from a war, that is god. If you have a friend who can't get laid and kills himself over a girl, that's god. If a country dumps nuclear waste into the ocean and kills all the life their, and the whole world eventually dies from the loss of the base of the food pyramid, that is god. Everything that happens must happen, because it is brahman. it was a perfect philosophy for seekers in Shankaras time. Maybe even in the bhagvhan's time - the person who renamed himself osho ended up teaching mostly a variant of advaita. But. advaita is one school out of several dozen, each with a slightly different, or very different idea about how to attain moksha liberation. Now we are here, at this time in history, and we have the ability to know that there are competing models of enlightenment. Should we still make the choice to pick one as true, and declare the other's false?

What is an "enlightenment type experience" as you mean those words in this context? Classic moksha enlightenments are about leaving this world behind, dying permanently, no rebirths (assuming one believes in rebirths) no connections, gone, gone, all the way gone, never coming back. (That's the mahayana heart sutra mantr -- gatey, gatey, paragatey, para samgatey, bodhi svaha -- "Gone, gone, all the way gone, gone all the way. I woke up! Boom!" Now, sex is usually the opposite of liberation from rebirth. In fact, sex is what got us reborn in the first place. And one does not exactly become highly motivated to get going from this existence when one is pressed tightly to someone who turns you on and motivates you to engage in something which is indistinguishable from making pregnancy happen. But, doing sex yoga is one of the fastest and strongest known methods for inducing trance visions and hypnogogic visionary states, for starting up the siddhis (powers), and a number of other things. If you include non-moksha "enlightenments", then, sure, I have, and pretty much anyone will who does sex yoga, sex magic, and deep sexual self-development. I think there is a lot to be said for the idea that a person who is not sexually completed, that is, who has not yet become sexually adult, known themselves through the eyes of their sexual partners, and has become sexually wise and at peace, may have specific problems with moksha enlightenments. They may regret and crave, seek to go back, and so on. ===================== Then there is the question and topics of sex and kundalini. And the sexual alchemys, including the taoist longevity alchemy and the making of elixirs and amrita. Very powerful transformative experiences with sex yogas? Definitely.

There's a delicious irony here, which is, psychedelic molecules are profoundly material. Arrange a bunch of atoms in a very specific and material pattern, and you then possess a key that fits into and operates a molecule scale lock. Then a small change occurs in the available amounts of a neurotransmitter - and then it's unto thee the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever aumn. LSD and psilocybin have a kind of inherent differentiation of effect. LSD works first on matters involving symbolic operations - that's language, words, speech, math, time, money, measuring, and logic - and vibration and frequency explorations, which includes things like the nature of reality and matter, certain types of "higher" emotions and ideas, etc. While psilocybin brings a high percentage of ingestors to topics involving biology, genetics, drives and motivations, sex and certain types of creativity, body intelligence, love and relationships and human dynamics, etc. And it seems to contain some built in tools for talking to entities and aliens, for dimension bending, and so on. Do you have a plan for how to rewire your meta-beliefs?

Anxiety about what? I am going to bet it is not about atman and brahman. Not about no-self. Mind and it's contents is very large. Ridiculously large. You have done a practice for a while. Not long by most standards. You can create a state. How far into the mind and its contents do you figure that state that you can create goes? You are in your state, made possible by practice. "However, my negative thinking/anxiety usually pops up in this 'no self' state and pulls me out of it. My anxiety seems to be getting stronger the deeper the more I seem to awaken." Where do the anxieties come from? They are habits and patterns of thinking, coming from the body-mind. You have practiced them for many years. With those years of practice, it's pretty easy for you to attain the state of anxieties inside of the state of no-self. The anxiety skills you have are out there in the vast mind and its contents. You enter no-self - or you enter some state. It attracts those skilled anxiety states like a light attracts moths. They come running to play in the light. That's why they are getting stronger. You are feeding them. You concentrate your attention, using your practice, and create a pool of focused attention. Is there anything an anxiety loves more than attention? Do some work on the anxieties. Resolve when can be resolved. Correct errors, if you can. Face problems that are real and can be faced. Make changes in the infrastructure of your attention and emotions. This is one of the things that people tend to overlook with advaita influenced practice and it's results. What is, is brahman. What occurs, is brahman. Your anxieties intruding, is brahman. Brahman is not an escape from problems. Brahman is bliss, and brahman is problems. Brahman's problems are your problems. ???????????????????????????????????????????? How large is the mind and it's contents? There are many ways to look at this and look for information on it that may be useful in one's practice. Mandalas, thangkas, temple paintings, and characteristic sacred art offers some models hat the cultures that invented many of our favorite systems seemed to prefer for representing the size of mindspace. Look at the backgrounds of many of the mandalas so valued that they were turned into important sacred objects. What do you see? Dozens to hundreds of figures, many tiny scenes and stories, all dynamically active and filling every otherwise unfilled square inch. That's a representation of what is within us. Here's an example:

If I recall correctly, that's an advaita practice, or a modification of an advaita practice from modern times, that builds the habit of awareness of unified whole systems and experiences. There would be practices that follow this. Our society prepares us to be workers by teaching us the opposite, to ignore whole systems and to focus on things as separated parts, especially ourselves. Did you do that practice much? It has a few pretty distinctive results. One would be that in almost any situation, you would be able, if you chose, to relax in one specific way and change your sensorium, which is a name for the bubble of perception that you paint onto what is around your body. The exact qualities of the change would vary from person to person, but it would probably include something like the appearance of networks of waves or lines or possibly tints or glows, indicating dynamics and connections, and a change in the sense of sounds from focus on alerts and communication sounds to an awareness of sound concentrations as an indicator of things like emotional charges carried by the beings in the observed space. (Sound and our sense of sound can do hugely more than we think it can do, in terms of carrying information and being a part of thinking and sensing and acting upon the world around us. ) Hey man, I want to point something out. In what I just said, I am using a somewhat tedious technical language that's meant for making fine distinctions about what is observed and about the changes that occur in people that do practices. I could have said the stuff about the results of the practice another way. But, if I did, it would communicate as talking about 'occult powers' or psychism. Which is what it looks like, there is some truth to that. It's important, though, not to lock yourself into ways of seeing things. If you instead make the effort to simply describe what is experienced with specific details like "a change in awareness of sound concentrations", that helps in keeping focus on what you directly experienced, and not the stories you tell yourself about what you experienced. So, if you did the practice you showed me a certain number of times, one result there's a reasonable chance of getting is sensorium changes like what I described above. There would be other results. Did you get any of the other results, do you know?

Perhaps we could talk about something like a 'use case', that is, about putting the ideas that you are describing into practices from which one hopes for various types of results. Are you choosing objects to be the nothing? Or yourself? Or words. Or the fabric of spacetime? e Are you familiar with the expression "form is void", the mahayana buddhist teaching of the emptiness of existent things, based on a book called the Heart Sutra? Do you think this might be the origin of the method you are talking about? Could you desceibe a practice in action, and how it is supposed to work?

Cool, I haven't seen many people here writing from the perspective of the "Many "i"s" teachings and models. Gurdjieff? Most here seem mostly to be using a "Unitary "I"" teaching, or its obverse, some variation on the "No "I"" teaching. Mind is ego? What is your sense of how that is, how it works? What is your definition of "ego"? I try to avoid the use of the word "ego", because it's become a catch-all word, or, you might call it a "dump word". If you study how the word is used, you find that many meanings are projected onto it, and most of those meanings severely conflict. This is true about the word in its dictionary definitions and etymology, and much more so among people doing some type of self-development or consciousness or actualization work. So, if we are to use the word "ego" we should share and calibrate definition. To give some examples of the loading of definitions..... The etymology online dictionary says this: ego (n.) 1714, as a term in metaphysics, "the self; that which feels, acts, or thinks," from Latin ego "I" (cognate with Old English ic; see I). Psychoanalytic (Freudian) sense is from 1894; sense of "conceit" is 1891. Ego-trip first recorded 1969, from trip (n.). Related: egoical; egoity. In the book of Egoism it is written, Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity. [George Meredith, "The Egoist," 1879] Related Entries alter-ego egocentric egoism egoist egomania egotheism egotism egotist egotize I super-ego trip Wiktionary ========== From Latin ego (“I”). Chosen by Freud’s translator as a translation of his use of German Ich as a noun for this concept from the pronoun ich (“I”). ========== Merriam-Webster ======= 1: the self especially as contrasted with another self or the world 2a : egotism b : self-esteem 3: the one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that serves as the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality especially by functioning both in the perception of and adaptation to reality — compare id, superego ================== Ego is the Latin word for "I." So if a person seems to begin every sentence with "I", it's sometimes a sign of a big ego. It was the psychologist Sigmund Freud (well, actually his original translator) who put ego into the popular vocabulary, but what he meant by the word is complex, so only other psychologists really use it in the Freudian sense. The rest of us generally use ego simply to mean one's sense of self-worth, whether exaggerated or not. When used in the "exaggerated" sense, ego is almost the same thing as conceit. Meeting a superstar athlete without a trace of this kind of ego would be a most refreshing experience. But having a reasonable sense of your own worth is no sin. Life's little everyday victories are good—in fact, necessary—for a healthy ego.

Football, that is, soccer in the US, (and of course that strange game which is US football) is practiced these days as a mass media spectator sport that distracts people from the misery of their slavery. Works pretty well as a distraction for a lot of people, apparently. I don't get it personally. Those types of team games are based on old training methods for soldiers, meant to build imprinted body patterns of team movement and loyalty, So if you are actually playing, it's a bit like a yoga with the ultimate purpose of killing - which makes it fascinating to many males. Team killing always defeats massed individual warriors killing, and training young men in it, particularly the expendables you want to have available if you want to do an invasion or two, is high priority in all large earth societies. Which means, everybody involved, from the future cannon fodder, to the slaves wanting to be distracted, to the slaveowners looking to add to their bottom line with the occasional invasion, are all highly motivated to spend all the energy needed to keep that ball moving back and forth. Anyway, for the majority, football is very nicely distracting entertainment. And for the majority of people who doing meditation, magic, attending groups and doing retreats and such, and most of the much smaller group intently seeking enlightenment, all those practices are also entertainment, a distraction from their enslavement and misery. The fact that they hope that it offers other benefits and life improvements, and it often does, does not mean it is not entertainment. The fact that they might be deadly serious and passionate about what they are doing does not mean it is not entertainment. The best entertainments all have that quality of creating intense passionate involvement and caring. Like a great video game, or hating the other team at a match. It's about passion, which makes you forget everything else in the world. So, in a very real way, football and enlightenment are equal. Perfectly balanced. It's all fun and games until somebody actually gets enlightened. Which you could say means that football is far superior to enlightenment. Because there is essentially zero risk that a spectator is going to become a real football star.