BipolarGrowth

It is fair to say I’m captivated by Buddhism. You are right in that there are plenty of western people trying to water down Buddhism. I’m not a fan of this myself. And I wouldn’t necessarily claim that any Buddhist sources I learn from have reached some ultimate level of spirituality in part due to this concept being hard to define, more difficult to verify, and even harder to be sure that it is actually understood by oneself free from lots of self deception. I’ve spent a good amount of time studying and practicing in types of Hinduism. Hinduism is more of a beginning foundation for my spiritual practice and understanding than Buddhism. I find the deeper understandings within Hinduism and Buddhism to be quite hard to distinguish. When I listen to the Ashtavakra Gita or Avadhuta Gita being read and compare it to the Vajrayana Buddhist teachings coming from more original sources such as Padmasambhava, it seems to me that a very similar truth is being pointed to. My introduction to eastern spirituality came initially through Hinduism as the ice cream of my sundae, and Buddhism now serves as the whipped cream and cherries on top of the sundae as I’ve only really begun learning authentic Buddhism in the past 2-3 years. I’ve eaten the ice cream again and again for some years, and I’ve naturally moved on to being interested in the whipped cream and cherries more lately. Of course it’s not a good meal if you don’t return to at least a few bites of the ice cream regularly to create the requisite variety for maximal enjoyment. Lol. I guess that’s a good fat American analogy for describing how I relate to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

@Someone here thanks for the warm welcome. Things are going quite well. Life always has its challenges, but nothing worth complaining about really. I hope you’re in an enjoyable season of life too.

Chögyam Trungpa has quickly become one of my favorite, if not my all-time favorite, spiritual authors. He was born in Tibet and brought up within the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition as a teacher since birth. He earned the equivalent of a Doctorate of Divinity at a young age. As he was nearing adulthood, he was forced to move from his home in Tibet due to the Chinese invasion. Eventually, he began to settle in the United States and other western countries as a spiritual teacher. Some have claimed that he has had one of the most potent influences on successfully bringing authentic Buddhist teachings to the West. In this book, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa introduces us to a new way of interfacing with spiritual practice and living the good, virtuous life. Shambhala is meant to serve as a secular path into the truths usually found in mystical or religious contexts. Although secular, the Shambhala tradition is not without its magic and deep appreciation of the beauty of human potential in this life. A warrior in this tradition is a fully authentic spiritual practitioner who moves toward creating an enlightened society due to compassion flowing toward other sentient beings. It is easy to see a strong influence from the author’s training in Buddhism reflected into the structure of the Shambhala tradition. I personally find great value in viewing the spiritual process of growth and development from various perspectives, and Shambhala introduces us to new terminology which gives insight into a unique process and view which can also be seen as universally applicable. I encourage those of you looking for new spiritual books to read or philosophical models to interface with to check out this book and even more so this author. And in keeping with the style of this forum, Buddhism will not make you Awake and is a complete waste of time 😉 If you might be someone who should restrain themselves from overusing psychedelics due to personal factors, Chögyam Trungpa is a great and accomplished teacher on how to waste your time incredibly effectively.

I just logged onto the forums for the first time in a while to make a post about the Life Purpose course. I bought the course probably 2-3 years ago, but I’ve only been committed to it once I hired a life coach. It’s taken me 1-2 months of 20 minutes each morning to finally complete the entire values pass section. It’s great to see that you’re motivated to come back after several years to work through the course again. Just the values pass portion alone has done wonders to clarify my life.

Now one must ask if the original post in this thread or my new signature is of lower quality.

Here’s one way that can go down.

Thinking isn’t negative. Negative thoughts are negative. And labeling a thought as negative is a negative thought. If you would like to get out of such ruts as you mention, I think it’s going to take a change of perspective. Thought is not bad, and I actually doubt it’s much of your problem at all. You can say obsessive or negative thinking is your problem, but I’d say we need to “go meta” on this situation and see that your lack of trust in life and love of life in whatever moment comes is the real issue. At the end of the day, this is what meditation is meant to cultivate. Your meditation shouldn’t be measured by the lack of thoughts you find. It should be measured by the degree of love for life that you find after doing meditation or a certain spiritual practice. If whatever practice or type of meditation you’re doing isn’t producing this, a mistake is being made somewhere. Examine your life carefully to find moments where whatever you’ve just done has seemed to produce the result of loving and embracing life. You’d particularly be looking for constructive behaviors rather than destructive behaviors obviously. After the first hit of heroin, a lot of people can love life for a bit, but we’re after behaviors that are sustainable. Your walks sound like an activity which has many positive effects on you. You can try using that as a sort of meditative practice. Instead of seeing obsessive thinking during the walk as a type of failure or undesirable element of the moment, you can work on being able to notice that activity in a somewhat detached manner all the while you continue enjoying the good parts of your walk like normal. Maybe all of this “advice” is wrong and doesn’t work for you. If that’s so, throw it out and forget it. This is only one perspective. Anyway, best of luck.

How do you strive without desire?

Sure there are plenty of actions we can take to awaken. The issue is that awakening shows precisely how little reality there is to thinking the ego takes actions. The ego acting and getting what it wants is a gross oversimplification of what is happening. When I wrote this, I just had the momentary inspiration to illuminate the partial perspective that it is God and the conditions of our existence which are given to us that ultimately awaken us rather than our efforts. Of course there is plenty of validity to seeing awakening as a personal journey and endeavor which takes focus, determination, strong desire to break out of the limiting norm of common behaviors and perspectives, and much more. The OP already illuminated the effortful and individual part of the equation, so I illuminated the effortless and God/destiny driven part of the equation. Both are relevant, and neither is correct on their own. Even together, these understandings point to a very limited picture of what goes on when awakening happens. @CoolDreamThanks was essentially saying that someone has to want to bake a cake for a cake to be created. I was saying that without the conditions of a baker’s existence giving him or her the ingredients of flour, sugar, and the other fattening ingredients used to make a cake, you’re not getting far. One important thing to understand is that one of the conditions for a baker’s existence is that they want to bake things. This also is in some ways deterministic. Desire is oftentimes not entirely up for us to choose. The desire to awaken isn’t something most human beings can cultivate deeply given their current life circumstances, and this is a huge reason why awakening isn’t that common of an occurrence. Awakening is actually not that difficult, but finding yourself with enough intrinsic desire that you would succeed on the path toward awakening is quite rare. The conditions that give a person a strong enough desire to awaken are more of a limiting factor than the difficulty of the awakening process.

I think it’s ultimately not up to the ego’s attempts at engineering experience to reach God. God will find you now. Or God will find you later. Some people are meant to be more worldly. Others are meant to be more spiritual. Both are fine. God is always there regardless. Psychedelics don’t let you find God. Prayer doesn’t bring you to God. Meditation doesn’t bring you to God. Good actions don’t bring you to God. Spiritual knowledge doesn’t bring you to God. Wisdom doesn’t bring you to God. God brings you to God. And if the ego is given a path using any of the methods above, it takes credit for what God provided.

In my experience, the best way to develop freedom from attachment is to find yourself experiencing something so fantastic, pleasurable, wonderful, and blissful that all of your desire for everything and the entire world of experience, consciousness, and form is quenched, if only for an instant. I think people will find this potentially counterintuitive in practice. My first taste of this possibility came entirely unplanned in the middle of a normal day and typical activities for myself. It seems like many people get the idea that reducing attachment means getting less of things they want by some forced monk-like behavior. To me, this is doomed to fail. You’ll end up repressing behaviors and your desire which does not reduce it or do away with it. It only hides desire and instead develops aversion which is just as rooted in attachment as any sort of desire is. We are attached to numerous things, feelings, people, and activities which has us wandering in samsara endlessly. This happens because we keep looking in this world for deep, fulfilling, and perfect satisfaction when this world is entirely incapable of providing that. With the right practice, the Mind can recognize that there is no solace to be found in this world. It helps for the Mind to see some of the highest levels of bliss that experience can offer though. Before this point, the Mind might think it is still missing out on something in the world of experience. It can then stop trying to pry perfection from what is imperfect. Then the Absolute can rest within itself. This is the liberation I’m seeking.

How old are you? Do you live with your parents? Are you 100% responsible for your own living expenses? Do you have much ambition? Productivity and getting shit done essentially fell into place for me out of necessity. I can’t well tolerate myself being a completely worthless loser for long. I spent about a year doing that. I was off work for most of that year span and had hundreds of awakening experiences which permanently leveled up the potency of my direct experience. Still, after a year of doing that, bills started to pile up, and I also begun to get a bit bored of only doing spiritual stuff. When you awaken deeply enough, spirituality becomes boring. You see through the game for what it is. Still, it’s more interesting than everything else, so there’s no need to stop. There’s also no need to try to get somewhere else. You never get somewhere else. Integrating spirituality with normal life is a task that can be worked on and perfected as long as you like. Engage with both worlds, and immerse yourself deeper in each until they fuse into one.

Where did the Buddha say this? I think your quote is mistaken or at least misunderstood. Here someone gave a breakdown on the validity of that quote: https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/what-you-think-you-become/ All mental formations are described to be not self. This includes thoughts or any type of mental phenomena you can conceive of. A crucial element to understand about the Buddha’s teachings is that you do have the ability to control your mind to varying degrees, based upon the amount of practice you have devoted to developing this capacity. You control your mind in Buddhist practice by guarding your sense doors, that meaning you become aware of whenever you are grasping after transient elements of experience as if they will provide some type of lasting fulfillment and stop that grasping once it is recognized. I’ve been studying The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya) lately, and over and over again it is stressed that you should turn your mind from the unwholesome to what is wholesome. What is considered wholesome in the Buddha’s teaching is whatever leads one away from the hindrances and instead leads a person closer to the destruction of the hindrances or otherwise called the taints which is synonymous to awakening. The hindrances are sloth and torpor (essentially being lazy, unmotivated, and lacking energy when it concerns reaching full enlightenment and liberation), restlessness and worry (anxiety/stress essentially), desire for sense objects, ill-will or hatred, and doubt (mainly referring to doubt in the Buddhist methods as effectively leading to the ending of suffering which is related to ignorance). You should rightfully be concerned that you are having intrusive thoughts that not only produce suffering now but also condition your mind to further suffering in the future. Consider your mind like a computer’s CPU. Unwholesome thoughts are like viruses or malware on a computer. The higher percentage of the CPU which is taken up by this sort of malicious activity in a given moment, the less ability the computer has to run your desired programs properly. The desired programs in this case would be your mind recognizing the Absolute, being full of contentment, confidence, loving-kindness to all beings, stillness, happiness, etc. Basically this means non-resistance to what is. The experience which you really want is an awakened mind free from the woes of petty ego worries and problems which are all self-generated of course by seeing reality incorrectly. Intrusive thoughts obviously bring you to more ego bullshit and issues. Watch for those thoughts, and incline your mind to something healthy or productive instead. As you do this, over time you will find that your CPU has less and less viruses and malware up until the point it is running at maximum capacity without issue. Here’s a video from a Buddhist teacher, Dhammarato, who does a great job of focusing on the essential practices of early Buddhism: He has tons of videos on this topic, and his teachings line up quite closely with what you find in the Suttas. I’ve spoken to him a number of times, and it is clear that he knows what he is talking about and has the ability to clear up a lot of misconceptions people pick up from quasi-Buddhist sources.

Answered.

“See it” is of course meant metaphorically. I can tell that you quickly skimmed because the entire point of the article is describing the distinction and differences between citta (mind) and viññāņa (consciousness). The title is mind vs. consciousness. Not mind is consciousness. The first two sentences of the document: “1. What is the vinnana (consciousness)? One cannot find the mind (citta) within the objectified consciousness (vinnana) nor could one find a consciousness which has become ‘unestablished’, for the very meaning of consciousness itself in Buddhism is that it resides within and is codependent upon other for its very existence and definition. [SN 2.104] “ Unconditioned means no conditions. Consciousness is an entire sensory world of conditioned and impermanent qualia which are ānatta (not the self - used as an adjective not a noun). The unconditioned, which can also be called nirguna Brahman or the Tao which cannot be named (paradoxically), is the mind/ultimate reality/absolute which is not coming into contact with the sensory world through the vehicle of consciousness and the other aggregates (perception, physical form, mental formations i.e. thoughts, conception, subtle mental forms, biases, etc., and feeling/feelings/emotions) arising together dependent upon each other which occurs due to citta/mind grasping for/desiring that which is impermanent or in other words the world of form, consciousness, and experiential phenomena. When citta/mind/absolute is either maximally satisfied within the world of experience such that it seeks (grasps) no longer for anything better or is maximally disenchanted with everything experiential, the illusion of this world is let go of which leaves only one thing left which is the unconditioned absolute.