BipolarGrowth

From what I’ve seen they just keep getting sucked into spirituality more and more. This is potentially one of the hardest things to stop when you’re getting results from it. You have to really get clear on why a foundation will help and remind yourself consistently. Otherwise you risk having nothing to show for your life other than awakening. That’s not the best life, but it can be a good one. It’s incredibly hard for me to be motivated by simpler self-help things now too. There is a real possibility of you being paralyzed in life by satisfaction brought about through spiritual work. The issue is that it’s not necessarily a problem, but it is far different than what most people’s goals actually are.

@softlyblossoming I tried typical linguistic self inquiry a number of times. It didn’t do much although it did work to some degree. I spent about a month or two doing the type I mentioned in the post pretty much every day. Had some large changes from that.

There’s no I to be the universe or submit to anything.

Really deep Intelligence is unintelligible and does not fit in such linguistic categories well as a result. As far as approximations go, your journal isn’t bad.

No one has ever physically died who you can talk to. The people who will claim such a thing are confusing a profound experience of loss of self which might even include all loss of a body, but this is not physical death in the traditional sense. Therefore, no one can actually tell you shit about the moment of actual death unless you’re open to believing a spirit or entity which could very well just be a projection of your mind’s expectations about the subject even if it appears to you as a “real” entity right in front of your own eyes that you can touch, smell, and talk to. This is coming from someone who has completely lost all sensations of the body in the sixth jhana and higher jhanas, experienced entities of a similar type as I described, and had a complete loss of intense bodily pain replaced by profound bliss in an experience of surrender to the notion of physical death while in a physical emergency. Now I will say though that from my experience the loss of attachment to the ego that comes from intense physical duress does correlate with wonderful experiences, so it’s not necessarily a bad theory that it will be a wonderful moment. My mom describes one of her near death experiences as probably within the top two experiences of her life if not the top also, and we all know there are plenty of others who say similar things. From my experience, I’d wager that going from “normal” life with a body and everything rather humanish to infinite consciousness (not referring to the sixth jhana in this part, something closer to how Leo might use that term) to the eighth jhana to cessation to the eighth jhana to infinite consciousness to “normal” life in the span of two to three seconds takes a big shit over most NDEs in regard to profundity and general awesomeness, and you can do that without having to actually die as a human in an “objective” sense. I have really no clue how to get someone or even myself to that point again plus it’s not even the best thing I’ve experienced, but I bring it up simply to point out there’s a whole lot of amazing shit you can do in this life. You don’t have to procrastinate until your death bed for something amazing on the hope that some people’s assumptions are correct about death. Get to work.

Stop asking linguistic questions and start looking for the feeling of a self at the level of sensations. Body scanning is a good way to do this at the beginning levels. Asking linguistic self-inquiry questions did pretty much nothing for me personally. You can of course start the inquiry with a linguistic question to get the sensation-based inquiry rolling. This is the best thing I’ve seen/used in regard to self-inquiry over the years other than tweaks to it I’ve developed personally

100%

You can still do spirituality and philosophy while tending to the more basic parts of life as a priority to build a foundation. Doing a bunch of psychedelics at 17 is probably a bad move in most cases for example though. If I hadn’t started my own business and seen it succeed before getting more hardcore into spirituality, my life would likely be far worse than it is now. I was doing spirituality and philosophy years before starting a business, and this was fine as I hadn’t taken it too deep until after the business was doing well. This wasn’t really a strategic move on my part. The dominos just happened to fall in the right order. I encourage you to build a foundation with meditation while you set your survival situation more in order. Build your credit, save money, find a decent job or go to college, invest your saved money, live below your means, build social skills, focus to a degree on relationships and growing in that area, etc. Doing all of these things before going too deep into spirituality has served me quite well. If you succeed to a high degree with spirituality too early, you might sap yourself of the motivation and ability to develop these more basic things. I’ve seen it happen to multiple friends from this very community firsthand.

Greater holistic understanding and the multiplication of skills in different areas can lead to far “higher” states of consciousness

If someone thinks “I am God” somehow equates to control, they are a noob.

I like Jim Newman. He seems to get it.

Worst movie of my life

I could post this to the spiritual memes megathread, but my potential bias based on my personal forum usage is telling me hardly anyone pays attention to those megathreads anymore. Ah, well now I’ve found a reason to make this a poll as well. These memes were all made by an Actualized forum user who for some reason has an aversion to being given credit for her own work. I guess we can’t all be perfect in all ways.

Nothing wrong with enjoying a church.

This. Also, I’m too lazy to discuss it right now in the detail it deserves. You can go watch my recent videos on my YouTube channel if you want an idea of what it’s done for me.

Leo has already mentioned Mansur Al-Hallaj before, but a blog post isn’t a bad idea

This is exactly how it’s been for me as well. I prefer doing fire kasina meditation or vipassana for the strongest experiences. Vipassana has been stronger for me. Building meditation skills while on your favorite substances has been quite transformational. People treat psychedelics like a guy taking steroids who sits on the couch all day. Start using the performance enhancing drugs to actually get better at doing the practice is my advice if you want to learn how to do it well completely sober if you want to see this skill develop anytime soon.

@Michal__ my first cessations were on THC as well. Delta 8/delta 10 THC mixture to be precise.

The second image used to be the wallpaper on my phone for a while ❤️??

These are the only things worth spending much time on ?

Now why did you share this?

What is overwhelming you in specific? I’d suggest starting by pinpointing the main causes for this. Then you can start to really ask yourself “do I need this?” in regard to each item. Beyond that, give yourself more time without obligations. Obligations almost always bring seriousness with them in a nearly unavoidable way in many cases. What do you like to do for fun? Don’t worry about distractions. The easiest way to remove distractions is to stop seeing things as distractions. Seeing distractions everywhere is for middle aged bald men who take even drugs seriously ? An awakened master was once asked what the point of life was. He said the point is to play. We know this as children innately when survival is taken care of for us, but we forget it over time as we must do more and more to sustain our own survival. Stop focusing so much on survival. It’s gonna happen either way. Focus on living. If you want an exercise, go run, but not as a physical exercise. Run like you’re a child on a playground. And laugh at yourself for how goofy it feels and why such a thing even needs to feel goofy.

?????

This was a great exercise for seeing how ignorant journalists are when they report on something. If the guy had done five minutes of research, he could have discovered 5 MeO can be created synthetically and actually helped those toads he seemed so concerned about. Also, telling people exactly how a crime is committed is a pretty stupid thing to do. Lol.

The only way you’re limiting yourself is foolishly convincing yourself that this is somehow a limitation.