BipolarGrowth

No need for belief. The evidence is unquestionable.

Your experience is all that your experience can ever experience. More to the point, experience is all that experience can ever experience. I think you’re getting caught up way too much in the subtleties of words like imaginary, real, dream, etc. None of those words are necessary.

How can you trust the insights provided by a man-made technique like meditation?

*Costco

Maybe the neuroticism brought about by no fap and no porn is worse than fapping and porn?

Good luck having the motivation for mastering dating after enlightenment.

Even one property can cover the costs of property management and provide short-term cash and long-term net worth increases if you make a good purchase. I currently manage $4k/month in gross rent, and it takes only a few hours per week when things are busy. When things aren’t busy, it takes maybe an hour per month. I do have a business partner though, so this cuts down some of the time I’d have to put toward it if I was doing it all on my own. I probably won’t consider handing things to a property manager until $10k/month in gross rent or higher because until then it’s such a small time investment that it really isn’t an issue to do things on your own. This business makes me so much more per hour of my time than any traditional job I could get. As the business grows, I actually gain more time as I have less need to spend time at traditional jobs which give me less money for the amount of time invested.

There are a number of people who understand things to a pretty notable degree here. I say this mostly due to having many extensive one-on-one conversations with people I’ve met through the forum. There are even people who I thought were relatively clueless in regard to spirituality while only seeing their posts, but they were shown to know far more than expected once I was able to hear them out in a format which allows for more information to be shared. Keep in mind that every person has different subtleties held within their usage of common words like awakening, awareness, ego, etc. The forum is not an easy place to understand what people actually are meaning when they say words such as those. In a lot of cases, a plethora of experiences are informing their individual definition of a term such as those even if both of you agree to the same shorthand definition. A text-based conversation simply does not leave enough room for these subtleties to be hashed out unless you want to spend literally multiple extra hours typing compared to how long it might take in verbal communication.

It seems that you use “imaginary” in a very similar way to how I use “fabrication”. I started using the word more when I started getting deeper into Buddhism. There’s an idea in Buddhism that the jhanas, at least the formless variants, are going to levels of lower and lower fabrication. There’s an aspect of this line of thinking which is biased to the human perspective as humans start typically from form, but I think it has some usefulness. A chair to me seems to be just as fabricated as anything else. The only difference is that to unravel the fabrication as a human it takes more practice to do so than to unravel thoughts for example. In the right state of consciousness, you can rather easily remove a chair, your body, or anything else essentially which I’m sure you are aware of.

Can you describe some of the differences between using fabrication vs. imagination in this context? To me, they seem to be rather interchangeable although contain subtle differences.

You can use “fabricated” in place of “imaginary” in certain cases too. It might drive the point home in a slightly different way.

Nice. Thanks for sharing.

An important part of many Theravada teachings that remain today highlight the idea that no longer incarnating at all is superior to heavenly or supremely pleasurable incarnations. Sure, the story goes that these higher incarnations are in ways better than being human, but they all involve suffering to some degree whereas parinibbana is essentially the ceasing of incarnation altogether which leaves no room for pleasure or suffering. To some, this can sound bleak, but I will say that going through cessation shows why many highly developed spiritual people have viewed no further incarnation as better than even the most heavenly and transcendent of incarnations. IMO, no one has a clue about what is going to come even in the next instant. The idea that one does know is a tricky illusion. Creating hollow beliefs of what comes after death seems like a waste of time to me. Enjoy this as much as you can. What comes next is a mystery. Hell, even this is infinitely mysterious.

Care to share how you go about Bhakti? Glad to hear things are going well.

No past for prior incarnations, no future for incarnations to come, and most importantly, no present moment that does not move faster than any thought process or recognition of a currently existing incarnation. Reincarnation is a fun myth. It’s potentially got some relative truth to it but nothing more.

@catcat69123 nice to hear it’s healing to some degree. Keep it up!

Good that the mania is at bay. Beware of the higher potential for mania if sleep is reduced btw.

My bipolar symptoms have essentially vanished during the past three months or so. I’m more stable now than I’ve been in several years.

NS is typically defined as being something that occurs from going through the eight jhanas in order first, so if we’re to use that definition which is commonly used, it’s not NS. The trip experiences I described as “black out” rather than “black hole” which mean two very different things to me, but I can see how they sounded very similar. Black out, in the way I use it, is also different from having trouble recalling things very recent (less than a minute), so I’m talking about essentially three types of things here. Cessation has an abrupt entrance and exit from the “no experience” “state”. I have had some things happen where things weren’t as noticeable, and I wondered if cessation had occurred although it wasn’t as clear as the most notable times it’s happened to me. Black out is essentially a less abrupt entrance into the loss of experience in the typical timeline of things and a less abrupt exit from it. The cases of being unable to recall very recent events came mostly from so much going on to such a high intensity that you’re recalling like 0.1-1% of what happened, so you know that you were conscious although it’s impossible to really access what happened pretty much at all through memory. Phenomenologically, NS = cessation. It’s only the context of how that “state” occurs that makes it one or the other from what I’ve gathered. NS also has the feature of being more predictable in some cases than cessation. Another thing with NS vs. cessation is that I typically see cessations described as very short while NS seems to have more of an idea of longer duration associated with it although there is no sense of duration in NS or cessation apart from how experience presents itself on the two sides of NS or cessation.

Cessation felt for me much like being on the event horizon of a black hole sucking in all of existence/reality/Gawd into it. As amazing and indescribable the event horizon was, it was not nearly as incredible as the cessation of experience. On a number of trips, I’ve reached black out type stuff if the dose is a bit high. It also happens at times that things are so ridiculously powerful that you cannot really remember even what happened in the past minute, 30 seconds, 10 seconds, even 1 second at times. These types of situations do have a feeling of being more profound than many amazing trip or meditation stories that I can recall, but there is a certain hollowness with comes with the fact that recall/memory may be essentially impossible or completely impossible.

I did a poll a few months ago about how many people have mental health issues on the forum. Over half of the people who responded had some relationship with mental health issues. It’s important to keep in mind that many people come here dealing with stuff already. Actualized.org has probably helped way more than three people avoid suicide.

I’ve not enjoyed any other talk by him as much as this.

Who is your favorite comedian?

Don’t fall into the trap of seeing everything as a trap ?

Psychosis = so different from normal behavior that it requires a stronger word Psychosis has actually not that much to do with your internal experience compared to how your behavior is perceived by others. I’ve had plenty of internal experiences as intense, or even more intense, than my internal experience in cases I was deemed to be in psychosis. Also, someone who’s typically perceived as weird will be less likely to be deemed to be in psychosis than someone who is typically seen as normal but has a sudden shift in behavior.