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@Simke Everyone has their dharma. Telling somebody they're doing something stupid will not work if they don't actually get it, which is probable. Unless they ask you, it's also uninvited and socially inappropriate to give advice/judgments about someone's behaviour. What you do is work on yourself, and grow as a person. And grow in your understanding of others.

@tashawoodfall I don't think psychedelics are a good idea with a history of psychosis.

In the words of Peter Ralston: "See, it's all relative." big toothy grin

This is one of the pitfalls with many teachers as well as people who listen to them. Taking states of consciousness for Truth/the self. Just because they are abiding doesn't make them any less of a state. If you used to not be in it, it is a state. This goes for all types of bliss, as well as emptiness. The mere fact that different teachers and gurus are not in the same state. Some experience just emptiness. Some experience bliss and emptiness. Some experience God. And with different depth/clarity. They don't use different terms just because of their personality or emphasis, they use different terms because they don't experience the same thing. An experience or state being subtle or incomprehensible, impossible to put into words and explain to someone doesn't make it "beyond experience" or "truth". People see it that way for lack of reference. Whereas if you cycled again and again in and out of different seemingly absolute and "beyond experience" states, it'd become clear none of them can be IT.

@Joker_Theory This kind of thinking would be stupid according to two different paradigms. If physical death is the end of experience, you'll never be enlightened. If rebirth is a thing as many traditions claim, you'll just be reborn and continue on in samsara.

The bliss Jan talks with regard to the God consciousness stage is definitely an extreme experience, a sort of high. There's another Kundalini guy called Harri Aalto who was unable to function for several years (while his wife took care of him) due to bliss. I personally got some experiences of bliss a few days after I got shaktipat (one the in absentia and once a retreat), it felt quite similar to the kind of bliss I had on LSD. Dropped the practices soon so kundalini symptoms and bliss went away as well.

@andyjohnsonman I agree, basically. But will expand this to dissolving the entire ego, conscious and unconscious. What I've learned in the last year is that spiritual insights and states of consciousness are peripheral to the main point of the path, which is ego dissolution. That includes shadow, and absolutely everything else.

@Daffcio Normal to feel stupid in this situation. You thought she meant something but now she says she didn't. Maybe she was joking, maybe not. But it doesn't matter, since she has now said she's not interested. It sucks to have unreciprocated feelings, I've suffered with several experiences of that. All you can do is stop acting on those feelings and take the heartbreak. Such is life.

@icequeen My heart goes out to you. I recommend supporting him and taking him to get help from mental health professionals. The situation sounds really really serious - eating disorder, suicidality. Sounds bad enough to be hospitalized. I don't know how badly underweight he is but if bad enough it can be lethal, as can trying to refeed on his own. People can't really deal with this severity of issues without professional help.

@Eric Tarpall I think the dynamic is the same as with heterosexual people. People who like being submissive want a dominant partner and people who like to dominate (like the men you talk about) want a submissive partner.

@moon777light I'm not personally a self-inquiry fan but there's basically two forms of self-inquiry. One is keeping awareness on awareness (or the self) and the other one is trying to find the self/become conscious of what you are. The first version is one taught by Ramana Maharshi. Ramaji has some videos explaining it quite well I believe. There's also a really simple version taught by Rupert Spira, so you can check out his videos on it. The other version is described quite well by Leo, where you try to put your attention on the truest sense of self you can find at the moment (which moves) and wonder "what am I?" With the second version especially, it can be frustrating. it's very normal to believe you're doing self-inquiry wrong. You're not.

I'm not sure why you imagine it to be solitude. Defining oneself based on others' opinions is not a requirement for enjoying their company and caring about them. In fact as a mentally strong and grounded person you can have relationships more honest and fulfilling, because they're about genuine relating rather than maintaining your self-esteem.

I never had experiences of beings or other fancy stuff, but some of my acquaintances did. The people who experienced beings, entities, colours and had crazy experiences in response to different energies were more unstable and had a turbulent time on the path. They would freak out and be badly affected by certain things and people. One commonality between them was history of psych use (especially a lot in a short window) as well as practices supposedly focused on different energies. I think certain energetic events destabilize people and give rise to extreme experiences. All such things are ultimately cognitions of the mind and reflect the state of the mind. The experience can be extremely alluring, kind of like drugs, that while possibly feeling incredible, are a distraction from real growth. Spiritual growth should as a big-picture trend calm the mind and emotional fluctuations of either negative or positive excitement. Things become more subtle, less fancy and exciting. Anything that causes big fluctuations and overwhelmingly pleasurable states is something to watch out for.

@Nervtine ❤

Lol. I'm having fun picturing that.

@LoveandPurpose By giving yourself the same love and understanding you'd give someone you really cared about, I suppose. It'll be a positive thing.

@LoveandPurpose It's certainly possible to build a more self-accepting and self-loving ego. It won't liberate you though.

@Andreas I read the summary of Paul Bloom's thing. He makes some good points about how acting from a place of emotional triggeredness can cause harm. Generally, when you feel for someone, it is still greatly about you. Through getting emotionally triggered yourself, you're not actually sincerely looking at the suffering of the person you feel for. Nor are you very helpful when you yourself can't emotionally handle someone else's problem due to your desperation. However, a true solution here is not apathy, or hating empathy. Maintaining a degree of apathy can make you more functional, but also less understanding and compassionate. When you try to be rational and not involved, you're shutting out the reality of what people go through. And when you don't fully acknowledge their pain, it's easy to ignore very real problems, or devalue those. When you seek to truly look at suffering, you will inevitably get triggered and emotional, because you've built up walls against seeing what's truly going on. But as you open up, and eventually manage to look at suffering without putting yourself in the middle, you become truly compassionate - you see people's problems without turning away, with clarity and calmness.

Make sure you don't resist the hurt Really? 100 pages sounds like a lot of advices, not one advice. I think there's a lot of useful advice that isn't longer than a sentence. The nuance and context is for oneself to figure out.

@Nervtine My early 2017 was near-suicidal. I definitely mistreated some people and have felt a lot of guilt about it. I've also had a strong desire to reconnect and set things right but realistically I intuit these people would just re-experience and deepen their negative reactions towards me. So it's best we all move on with our lives. One of the people I wronged, and frightened even, I had feelings for. It took over a year to get mostly over that. I'm gonna give a personal anecdote, with no real advice. But maybe there's something to learn from this. First of all I didn't want to feel the hurt I'd been caused, and kept having moralizing thoughts about certain people. How what they did was wrong. Then the next part, along with acknowledging some of the hurt, was realizing people had legitimate reasons to be upset at me, as looking back at my behaviour I said some selfish, inconsiderate and angry things. Then that opened up a lot of guilt, which took a very long time to clear. It'd keep coming up month after month at random times. Then as I gained more clarity in life I started to accept I didn't really have a choice to do anything else. There were strong reasons behind why I messed up. Judging myself for being an idiot in a near-suicidally depressed mindset doesn't make much sense. And furthermore, the person I had the biggest conflict with had mental health issues herself. So, instead of beating myself down for being wrong I started to get that it is not that simple. It's just two people with degrees of dysfunction getting triggered by one another. My feelings of hatred and anger went away almost completely. But it took quite a bit more time to let go of attachment to the positive feelings I had for her. The neediness I had. Because because of those she kept occupying my mind and I kept wishing I could do something, when it was clearly futile. Any kind of relationship between us wasn't meant to be. And my positive and fond feelings for her won't help her in any way. Craving those feelings is just torturing me at this point. It felt sad but at some point I was like "fuck it" and I became free from this. I'm not saying there aren't any subconscious fragments that could act up at times but by and large I have no attachment to her any more.

Non-dualistic nihilism and apathy is a very real problem. Apathy can get confused for enlightenment or dispassion, and people actually think that they're going in the right direction by becoming numb to the realities of existence.

@MellowEd Sounds like you're overthinking it. She's already your girlfriend. It's not supposed to be a strategic manipulative move. Be genuine. It's something you are feeling. If you want to say it, just say it. And let the chips fall where they may. Strategizing about how to express yourself to her is needy behaviour.

@Nervtine I think it's important to distinguish empathy (the ability to understand and share the feelings of another) from sympathy (feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune). In other words, I'd say empathy is the ability to understand another, while sympathy is an emotional reaction to someone's suffering. The ability to understand other people only grows when you gain perspective. The less self-centered and trapped by the ego you are, the more you see beyond yourself, including the suffering of others and the legitimate reasons behind that. Suffering in reaction to another's suffering is a blockage. It's not born out of pure understanding but an added desperation of "this shouldn't be like that". Desperation in face of another's suffering is really hard to let go of. It actually feels wrong to do so because it is seen as caring. It can feel that if we don't hold on to that, we're betraying the person who is suffering. Whereas in reality, caring comes from understanding, not the desperation. Desperation actually betrays a lack of understanding of the world, and also making things about ourselves. Making another's suffering about ourselves.

@Viking The Buddha claimed life to be inherently unsatisfactory for a reason. Because nothing in this life will be the "it" that makes you happy. At best you won't be truly satisfied, at worst you'll suffer miserably. There is no certainty and reassurance of "it's okay" that you can find in this life. Regardless of any type of meaning you come up with, you will still be fearful and uneasy. You will still crave. So if you really want to stop suffering, there's no dilemma here. The path is the way. Even if you don't make it to the end in this life (if you believe in multiple lives), purging your karma will lead to a growing ease. Pursuing some kind of worldly meaning does not come close to that. And also, not living for yourself and being virtuous are some of the core qualities you'll cultivate on the path anyway. You don't get enlightened by being a selfish asshole in a cave. I know some people quite far along the path who are incredibly humane and lead normal lives.

@legendary The fundamental trap is that what they (can't say for sure about Campbell because I'm not familiar with him) see as the path is a journey within mind, within the relative. Bliss, a being, all that can not be absolute. Whereas how I see it, the path to enlightenment is a journey within mind until mind gives way to what's beyond.