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@Leo Gura Do you know of any individuals with an intellect like Daniels, that also have a god realization equivalent in depth to yourself?

https://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/idm_foundations_01.pdf Have you come across Forrest Landry yet? He's a good friend of Daniels. This is his metaphysics ^ I would be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Also, how do you relate to the wave of emerging thought that the Transjective ( relationship ) is more fundamental than subjective or objective. @Leo Gura

@cetus56 I was just about to say, this post has become more beneficial by being taken out of context. It's always interesting to experience how relativity distorts.

@Serotoninluv Thanks for clearing this up. I had indeed meant this in a benign context

I apologize for the title and the use of the word insanity. I didn't mean literal insanity but rather, was riffing off the use of the word "insane" in the context of the quote. It was not my intention to ruffle any feathers. I agree that literal insanity is probably a torturous existence.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche This quote captures the essence of a great challenge in the early stages of awakening. It is a deep reminder for me of the alienation and self-doubt that arose when I first began to step outside mainstream culture. Thank you to everyone beating the drums to the song that keeps my feet moving.

@kieranperez Would you be open to sharing your process/plan for the emotional work. I'm always interested in finding new ways to tackle this side of development. Are there any specific practices, techniques, processes, therapists, etc that you will work with, or are you simply working through things in the way they present themselves? I'm also interested in how you plan to meet Wilber. Is he open to meeting with the public or will this be through events he is attending? I admire your vision and hope you'll post updates on how this evolves for you.

@Giulio Bevilacqua What you are experiencing is very normal. I will share with you my experience in this position. I am also 21. Early on in my development, I began experiencing a desire to disconnect. This peaked at a certain stage and I had dropped most of the things in my life. I had very little possessions and many of my relationships and the external things I was passionate about had faded away. The only thing that was still present was my "spirituality pursuit". While this may be a viable path for some, I discovered an important distinction at the crux of my current state. Some of the things I had disconnected from were a result of growth and wholeness, while others were disconnected from out of fear. This is a very important realization. When you are "moving towards enlightenment" it becomes very easy to use it as a justification for running from fear. I had justified escaping from many things that I needed to make peace with. These aspects will always be a hindrance to your capacity to let go until you invite them back in and integrate them properly. Sometimes letting go, requires falling into something rather than falling away from it. Now, a great question might be. How do I know if I am running from fear or, letting go into wholeness? The answer to this is found in the heart. It will require many mistakes and missteps before you develop an effective intuition. If music is truly something you love and not just a means to survival, then when you play, try to let go of all stories surrounding your music and just be with the experience of playing itself. The experience of music can be a timeless haven of blissful emptiness. If you cannot do this, then perhaps your music is inextricably linked with your fear of the future and solely a means to identity. The ultimate litmus test is to let go of all fear and see where you drift. The direction you drift is one of truth. Letting go does not mean disconnecting, escaping or quitting. It simply means surrendering to the now. I found I wasn't able to let go until I began to embody these insights... - Determinism ( no free will ) - No self ( the illusion of a solid self to hang your hat on ) - Mind dis-identification ( realizing you are not the mind ) - Effort and action producing spiritual awakening ( realizing that the essence of spirituality is in "being", not in "seeking" - Seeking is another story constructed by the mind ). Quitting something consciously is a subtle form of seeking. When you truly transcend something it will fall away effortlessly. A final thought. Could it be possible that your desire to leave the band is not a fear of success, but a fear of failure? Good luck my friend.

I was sitting on a hill under a small oak tree, looking out over a dimly lit city. It was dark and a cool breeze blew softly on my face. I had come to do self-enquiry but the mind seemed to be pulling towards contemplation. After acknowledging there was no control in the matter, the mind began to wander. The thoughts followed a familiar trail into the existential void and a question arose. “If there was not Now, what would there be?”. To which the answer was “Nothingness”. If there is not now. Then there is nothing. "Then what is Now?" When duality breaks down. When there is no perception of opposites, then everything merges into one. "Now is Everything" If now is everything, then now is also nothing. “Now is also nothingness” If the only alternative to now is nothingness, and now is also nothing. Then no matter whether you are in the now or nothingness there is still nothing. There is no escaping nothing Direct experience is far more important than this kind of thinking, but I always enjoy new ways to conceptualize the illusion of existence.

@7thLetter As you've pointed out, devilry is everywhere. Duality makes it so. Personally, the only thing that has reliably helped with the existence of devilry has been my spiritual practice. As my attachment to my identity dissolves, so does fear. Through the space this creates, I find it easier to gently guide myself towards unconditional love. Every time I've tried to force acceptance or Love it has backfired. The barriers between us and these fulfilling states must be dissolved to allow them to arise naturally. Fundamentally, the manipulation you've been experiencing is threatening your identity. Loosen your attachment to your identity and you loosen the grip of fear. Loosen the grip of fear and the devil looses its power over you. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” - Marcus Aurelius

@Smurfinstein This part sticks out to me. I had a "meditation practice"' for a few years and got nowhere with it. During this period I had meditation lumped in with all my other self development practices and sitting to practice required effort. Eventually I experienced a shift that lead to effortless meditation and rapid progress. From what I observed, this was primarily a perceptual shift. I realised meditation was not a tool for development. It was a tool for letting go of everything. Most people know this, but they unconsciously continue to use meditation for ego driven purposes. Once you are ready to surrender. The very act of surrendering will lead you to effective meditation. However, if you meditate with desire, then you are using meditation to reinforce the very thing that meditation exists to overcome. Imagine you had a basket full of fruit and each time you ate a fruit you felt full but soon became hungry again. One day, someone gives you a fruit that will cure your hunger forever as long as you watch it but don't eat it. It looks exactly the same as all your other fruit so you put it in the basket but remind yourself not to eat. Unfortunately, because you're so accustom to eating your fruit from the basket, you eventually eat this one too without realizing. To summarize: I feel your practice could transform by re-framing your beliefs. Rather than focusing on time and effort like you would with all you traditional self development concepts. Put your meditation in a new category. Meditation is the tool that helps you to see that all your other practices are illusions. The tool that points to your life as nothing more than a story. Don't turn meditation into a new story. Goodluck

If this has occurred due to your meditation practice ( which it likely has ) .Then there are two things I would recommend. Firstly, you may benefit from taking up a form of insight meditation ( I like Goenka's body scanning ). The point of insight practice is to examine what Buddhist's call the 3 marks of existence - Impermanence, Suffering and No Self. The reason I would suggest this is because it is likely that you are entering a dark night phase. You will pass through this swiftly if you continue practicing and allowing yourself to Be with what is. But if you get caught up in the fear and worry that this usually generates, you can get stuck feeling like this for a long time. Examining the 3 characteristics will enable you to experience deeply that this depression is just another state experience. One that need not be clung to. The second thing would be to adopt some form of positive psychology or loving-kindness practice. Work with practices that invoke states of gratitude, Compassion & Acceptance. Truth is raw. This will shift you in a more lighthearted direction. Everything is meaningless, but there is a deep beauty in that. Gently guide your perception towards this beauty. I find isolating myself deep in nature can be an amazing way to reconnect with a love for existence. But be warned, I have also experienced my deepest existential loneliness in the same environment. Good work with your practice. It sounds like you've made amazing progress. I look forward to hearing how it progresses.

My practice transformed radically once I began acknowledging that I had no control over my minds wanderings. I feel a lot of people fail to realise that meditation is not a practice in the application of effort. It is simply returning to the object of your meditation whenever awareness presents itself. You have no control over when your mind wanders, nor when awareness comes back. In the mind illuminated - the book mentioned earlier in this thread. The author points out that meditation is simply setting 2 intentions for your mind over and over again and then accepting whatever this results in. "Find the object" and "Be with the object". Initially this will feel insufferable because you will spend most of the meditation engrossed in thought stories. However, with time you will remain with your object for longer and longer and the mind will wander for shorter and less frequent periods. Consistency is paramount. While not entirely accurate, a good way to conceptualize this initially is to think of your awareness as a muscle. The more repetitions you do of returning to the object, the stronger it will grow. However unlike lifting, you have no control over when you get to do a rep. All you can do is make sure you sit everyday and when the opportunity to return to the object arises, you seize it.

In my own experience the answer to this is both. You will need to do more work to improve you situation. But self criticism will not support that. I've found that the more I reduce my self criticism, the more inclined I am to do good work. It seems that most of my inner resistances to doing the work are a result of a fear of inadequacy, which feeds of self criticism. You also have to be careful with this because it's not true for everyone. Some people require more self criticism, while others less. However judging from your explanation, you would definitely benefit from a reduction. I like to think of it like this... If the point of self criticism is to highlight your own inadequacies and therefore creating an opportunity to fix them. But the self criticism is leading to stagnation rather than progression. Then the self criticism is unwarranted and should be dialed down. I've found the development of awareness to be the only effective method to achieving this. Use your spiritual practice to strengthen your awareness, then use the new found awareness to observe and weed out self critical thought patterns. You'll soon discover that your criticism follows very distinct patterns. The more familiar you become with these patterns, the easier it becomes to detect or pre-empt triggers and the better you will become at breaking out of the emotionally hijacking that self criticism often creates.