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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

“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.

@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.

@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.

I'm interested to know where you would like to end up. Let's say you did "bite the bullet", what more from life would you expect? I don't mean this in a condescending way, I'm just intrigued to hear more about your expectations. Maybe your suffering is more a product of the illusion that you aren't where you should be, rather than the result of actually not doing enough. Thanks for sharing

It might help you calm down if you can objectify the learning process. Learning a motor skill is simple, the process unfolds like this... Unconscious(1) -> Conscious -> Unconscious(2). When you don't know how to do something at all, the skill is unconscious(1). In order to learn the skill, you must consciously act out the process. After enough repetition, the skill will automate and the process becomes unconscious again. Most people give up when learning something because they don't anticipate how challenging it is to consciously act something out based on instructions. This difficulty can create the illusion that you will never be able to learn the skill. Often leading to people quitting during the conscious phase of learning, thus never making it to the point of unconscious(2), where the skill becomes second nature. By knowing this in advance, you can anticipate the challenge and set expectations appropriately. The lower your expectations are the less negative emotion you will experience. Giving you more time and patience to make it to the unconscious(2) phase. When you try something new, you inevitably embody the fool archetype. If you can learn to accept and even love the role of the fool, you will go far in life. Most people never start because they fear failure. Which is unfortunate because failure is an inescapable part of growth.

If mindfulness style practices are too difficult initially, you could look at taking up a hobby that gets you into your body for a few hours a week. Like dance, surfing, mountain biking etc. You may find that this opens the door to a capacity for mindfulness. Good luck

@Surfingthewave That read like a poem, Love it. There's an interesting paradox here. How can anything be away from what is? Anything that is, IS. Searching and seeker are part of the "ISness'. Even though the seeker is under the illusion that there is a result that can be attained after a specific effort that is better than what they already have, they are still acting out what IS. How can anything in existence not BE. Everything simply IS, but not everyone has an embodied relationship with this realisation. This is what spiritual practice can cultivate.

You have identified that your sense of a self is not a concrete whole, but an inconsistent alternation between two versions of yourself. Could it be that there are many more of these sub-personalities hiding under the guise of "self"? If you explore this more deeply you will stumble across some great insights. Once you discover the fluidity of your identity, you're not far from discovering the self as an illusion. One day I was sitting on a park bench contemplating why I act differently around different people. Then it occurred to me that these different personalities weren't just extensions of my identity. They were micro-identities themselves. For example, the identity I embody when conversing with my younger sister shares very little in common with the identity I embody when at work. So much so, that you may ask yourself the question - "Which one of these identities is me?". If you sit with this long enough, you will realise that this thing you were calling a "self" is more like a process made up of patterns. When you see that you are a 'process' and not a 'thing', it opens you up to see that this process that is "you" did not begin at your birth, it has been unfolding since the beginning of time. Then you can start exploring whether this process is actually a process, or if that is also an illusion. A process implies time and if time is an illusion then maybe existence is just one infinite thing that IS. In his book Memories, dreams and reflections, Carl Jung talks about discovering a split in his personality at very jung age. I found his explanation of this very intriguing. Feel free to check it out.

Hi, @aklacor727 Here's a few things that were essential to the development of my practice. Good luck Have a target duration for high motivation days and a different target for low motivation days. After experimenting with the implementation of habits you will inevitably come to realise that motivation comes in waves. It's very easy to drop practices during the low motivation phases when your expectations are too high. If your target practice duration is 20minutes. Make that your aim on good days but set your target at 5 minutes for tough days. Consistency is more important than quality during the period before the habit is established and automated. Be hyper-realistic when setting target durations. Most people radically overestimate their ability to meditate for a set period at a consistent frequency. Meditating for 3 minutes a day won't bring much joy in the form of results, but it may be necessary in order to establish the behavior. Try to view the bigger picture. I know many people who have spent over a year attempting to establish a consistent 20 minute. Why not start with 5 minutes, and increase this by 5 minutes every month. Within 1 year you will have established a 1-hour practice in a very effortless manner. Dedicate a specific location to your practice and only practice in this spot. The is useful because your body and mind are primed to associate this location with your practice and your nervous system will begin to anticipate the behavior of practice when you sit there. It also helps eliminate the decision of where to practice which saps more willpower. Practice at the same time each day. As with the idea above, this will prime your body & mind and reduce the required will power. Create a positive association with practice. Not every sit is going to be a pleasant one but your overall feelings toward practice need to be positive, otherwise, it will be very difficult to sustain. Make sure you're constantly honing in on the pleasant aspects and re-framing the negatives ones. Build a relationship to practice where you look forward to sitting. If you do not feel this way, explore possible re-frames that positively impact your outlook. Build relationships that support your practice. It was already mentioned above, but joining a Sangha is incredibly beneficial. If you can't find a pre-existing one. Try finding a buddy or two to practice with once or twice a week. Accountability alone makes this worthwhile. Understand your practice and the path. There's nothing more demotivating than questioning if you are practicing "right". I personally feel as though reading the following two books will give you a comprehensive understanding of technique and progression. Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha by Daniel Ingram. The illuminated mind by Jeremy Graves & Matthew Immergut. While there is an entire world of different spiritual practices, I found these two books to be a great overview of Buddhist meditation and the territory you will encounter as your spiritual practice progresses. Making your spiritual practice this mechanical can be detrimental in the long run, so think of these structures as training wheels. When you are a dedicated practitioner, you can practice in a more organic and fluid manner. Before then, it really helps to assemble some processes and structures to assist in establishing the habit.

Hey @Yog I ran into a similar problem that I am still in the process of working with. As I began exploring post-orange ideas, I found it increasingly more difficult to differentiate between spiritual growth and spiritual bypassing. If you haven't heard the term before, spiritual bypassing is essentially using spirituality to turn a blind eye to your real human problems. There is a distinct difference between spiritual growth, and using spirituality to "escape" duality. I've since discovered that spiritual practice fueled by pain is vulnerable to transforming into bypassing. While spiritual endeavors conducted out of love and passion seem more likely to result in an experience of genuine growth. While my transition to green and beyond felt authentic, I hadn't effectively transcended and Included stage orange ( To use Ken Wilber's term ). This lead to problems with areas of my life that required orange like action, as I was viewing these needs as birthed off selfish and undeveloped motives etc. To cut a long story short, my solution to this has been to revisit many aspects of my stage orange endeavors and attempt to solidify them In a way where the benefits can be present in my life, without being fixated or controlled by the orange lens of the world. An example of this may be the ability to objectively conduct matters of business without being identified with the narrative of being a businessman. In this scenario, you are enabling yourself to create an income through orange processes, without being trapped in the ideals and beliefs that are part of that lifestyle. To use another of Wilber's ideas. You are turning stage orange from the subject into the object.

@Mu_ I made a video about suffering a couple of days ago. You've made some interesting points. I'll leave it here, as I feel like there are parallels between what we are communicating but also a few opposing ideas. Keep up the good work, It's not easy creating content.

I’m currently in the process of documenting 10,000 hours of consciousness work on YouTube. As of this moment, I’m focused purely on concentration meditation, sitting 6 hours a day, divided into 1 hour blocks. Because I’m only uploading once per day to YouTube, I feel as though a lot of the nuance within my experience is being skimmed over. This is an issue for myself and anyone who may be attempting to follow along. I would like to be able to look back over my experience without the illusions that will arise from hindsight bias etc. Therefore, I will be keeping a ‘sit by sit’ log/journal on this website (and other forums ). My aim is to report back here with the subtler details of my experience. Leaving gross details and longer anecdotes for my YouTube channel. I am currently 10 days into this process and have accumulated 44 hours of practice. Although I have missed out on the opportunity to document detailed experiences from these earlier sittings, I am not too concerned as there hasn’t been anything particularly remarkable about them, other than a gradual increase in concentration and some subtle observations outside of the practice. All the insights I have accumulated thus far have been somewhat accurately represented on YouTube. I have decided to begin this more comprehensive documentation now because I feel I am on the verge of entering more interesting territory. These first 40 or so hours have been beneficial for establishing myself in the technique and upskilling through research. I feel as though I am now at the level of understanding where experiential wisdom will benefit me more than additional reading. I will continue my research but with less of an emphasis on it. If you have been following my videos, heed this warning. Everything I am discussing is subjective and theoretical unless I explicitly state that what I am saying is backed by science. Therefore, a lot of the observations I am making may be scientifically inaccurate or misrepresentations of objective truth. My goal is not scientific accuracy ( Although I will maintain this where possible ), but phenomenological documentation. I urge you to view this experiment and the information it contains as a process/stepping stones of development. Each day, what I believe to be ‘true’, right’ or ‘wrong’ will change. As with all growth and change, there is nothing absolute about what I say or do. I hope you take this into account when analyzing my work. That being said, feel free to correct me on anything that you deem misinformed or a misrepresentation. This journal/log is an opportunity to map the way for anyone who is considering delving into more immersive/intensive consciousness work, from the perspective of a beginner, rather than someone who has already attained deep insights/awakenings. It is simultaneously an opportunity for me to seek guidance from those who have walked the path already. Feel free to ask me any questions at any time.