BipolarGrowth

Your friend is the Zen Master smacking you with his stick for not paying attention. If you want to discuss jhanas and samadhi, let’s talk. People here don’t talk of it much because they are using psychedelics rather than the capabilities of their own mind. (Nothing wrong at all with psychedelics)

Good explanation ?

It is not solipsism, and dependent origination is not only limited to the relationship between craving and things that arise from it. It’s about everything. Every “cause” is “causing” every other “cause” in an infinite chain, all arising and passing away right here and right now.

Witnessing thoughts is good, but I’d have to say that if you can change your thinking to only be “wholesome” thoughts as Dhammarato discusses, it would be a win-win. Wholesome in this sense does not mean simply moral thoughts but rather things that are worthy of your attention and investigation.

Can you explain the method or provide a link? My guess is that anything Osho taught practiced properly and consistently would lead to development of the first jhana qualities. The real question is if it is as effective and direct of a method.

Try working with Archangel Michael to reduce problems with “negative” entities, unless you like them being around.

That is what the definition of mahasamadhi typically is from what I’ve seen — that one leaves the body of their own volition after a typically very long life of spiritual practice.

@ZenSwift no problem broski, much love to you as well. Keep up the good work ?

Great. Thank you for the response.

I think the forum is too focused on spiral dynamics for one, lol. Not at all trying to point at you with that statement. It’s really a pretty flimsy model if you actually get out there and talk to living human beings. The model itself aids the forum members in becoming even more judgmental oftentimes. But there is a bit too much conflict here for my liking at times. It seems like people get too focused on proving each other wrong rather than arriving at the Truth together, and I am certainly guilty of this too. There is certainly a lot of toxic masculinity permeating this place I’d say. And it makes people like myself who would actually prefer a feminine energy more adopt some of the same toxic masculinity just to deal with the cesspool of hostility people are constantly projecting at each other. I come back here because there aren’t really better online communities close to competing with this one on many fronts, at least from what I’ve seen. The hostility is hard to avoid in an online spiritual community of this size focused on Truth though, so I’m not really blaming anyone for how it is. I'm speaking mostly about the meditation sub forum.

What do you think of the idea that self-interest cannot stop? By this I mean that the “self” merely becomes increasingly holistic until there is no resistance, but what happens is the “interest”.

If you want to talk more in depth on things, send me a PM. I’d be happy to help however I can. I can’t really give good advice on such a complex set of events without a lot more information. Either way, I hope you get to some smooth sailing soon.

Warning: nostrils are a finite resource, and the sense of smell is impermanent.

That’s a good way of putting it.

Sure man. You got me. I’ve in fact never been aware of that aspect of awakening ? Why don’t you enlighten us with a description of your moment-to-moment experience?

Happy New Years! ?❤️

Just parts of existence which produce desirable results. Just because a human body is one thing on a holistic level doesn’t mean there aren’t also toes and fingers within that. Existence works in a similar way. Of course it’s only You. But you are within You and You is within you. The sensations that make up a typical self structure obviously aren’t the entire whole. Awakening isn’t about the sensations of the old self structure disappearing from thin air forever. You still have a body, psychology, etc. at least most of the time. You can connect with whatever you fancy. I find Jesus and Krishna to be effective for me.

Hmm. This is quite an interesting combination of experiences. All I can say is the general advice for dark night of the soul stuff is to keep practicing if you want to break out of it sooner rather than later. It’s unfortunately quite a bumpy ride at times for most of us when progressing in insight. It looks like you’re already trying to incorporate a number of different approaches from what I gathered reading the other thread which is good.

@Ash55 that’s to be expected. Just realize you have some innate connection to spirituality which might be somewhat rare, and keep practicing consistently. Next time you can use that connection to actually hit some deeper awakenings now that you have more understanding of things and likely at least a bit less resistance to it.

I know you don’t think it’s just the psychedelic alone that would do that. I know you’re not an idiot. Of course it would have to be the psychedelic plus a crazy high level of existing development and the intention to leave the body for it to be mahasamadhi. I was just saying it takes a lot more than one dose of 5-MeO to get someone to have the choice of mahasamadhi. Maybe in Leo’s case he was close. That was after almost 30 days of back-to-back 5-MeO as well as probably more sober work into awakening and many more trips with other psychedelics. I still suspect he was not at the level of mahasamadhi even if he had continued, but maybe he was close to being the first person to accidentally awaken themselves to death in reliable recorded history. It seems pretty clear it would not be a choice made in a sober state to leave the body which is what I’ve at least heard of mahasamadhi being. I’m no expert in it. I’d say the number is probably closer to several hundred awakenings than several dozen. I guess it depends on what you call an awakening too. I say this as someone with hundreds of very strong experiences some newbies here would probably call “awakenings” if they had them which roll in daily for me now who recognizes I’m nowhere near mahasamadhi. The fact is it’s quite a blessing that mahasamadhi is so rare. Why would we want to stop the rollercoaster halfway through the ride? It seems like you get that to some degree at least based on your concern over it happening. I was already 99% sure that video is where this whole idea/thread came from when I first read it. Nobody knows the levels before they know them. There’s no shame in asking. I apologize if any part of my post seemed condescending. That’s not really what I intended. The initial part was basically just saying you’ll know it doesn’t produce mahasamadhi once you do it and look around after the trip is over. I just felt like saying in a spicier way. I guess it’s time to work on my sīla again like always. You know that, but you were still concerned about an incredibly low probability danger compared to a far more likely one because your ego doesn’t care about death supposedly. Why would you care about the accidental mahasamadhi? Come on now. I had an experience likely a bit like Leo did with the 5-MeO. I would’ve surely thought up to that point that I wasn’t worried about dying in some sort of amazingly spiritually transcendent way. When I arrived at that moment though where it felt like I really did have a choice to leave this reality without physical pain or anything like that, I of course had all of my loved ones and things I cared about flash before my eyes, in a sense, and was begging God to keep me here in this life. Rest assured, if you achieve mahasamadhi at any point, I vow to become a modern day bard and ruin karaoke nights in my local dingy bars singing of your spiritual elegance. Ah. There’s the spice again. Back to the sīla I go…

Lmao ?

Prayer is just another spiritual technique. You can do it whenever, at any level of realization. That’s like saying an enlightened person can’t talk to “another” being. All prayer is is one cluster of sensations relating to another cluster of sensations in which the latter is self generated through belief and intention. To answer the question of the thread, I pray pretty much every day. I’m not saying I’m enlightened by whatever conception of enlightenment someone reading has in their mind. Everyone has a different bar, and almost everyone’s ideas of it are in disagreement with each other’s and wrong in some way, including my own. Anyway, prayer is a great way to bring energy and activity into the chakras to supercharge your state if you want once you’re sensitive enough to sense these types of energies. To agree with @How to be wise, the type of prayer that occurs in stage blue people does not occur for people who have any real level of understanding of what’s going on. There’s a lot that distinguishes high conscious prayer from low conscious prayer. Most of the difference is just baked into the level of insight someone has when doing the activity. You can also think about prayer like this. Could an enlightened person bring the idea of Love to mind and experience a more pleasant state by focusing on the positive feelings and memories that idea brings to mind? You’re essentially doing this with praying to a deity or the Absolute in general. If it’s asking for your life to improve or some other more typical prayer like you see stage blue people doing, it’s probably just going to be more like a weak law of attraction exercise in most cases. That’s not really what I’m talking about here. To be more clear, there is an energy, an archetype, symbol of higher attributes in Jesus Christ, Buddha, Krishna, etc. in your mind. When the cluster of sensations which you could call an ego self intends to connect with this in some way, it’s in many ways the same as sitting down to meditate. Just doing an activity to raise consciousness. When you’re asking for specific egoic outcomes from this divine focus object, it’s really a pretty low form of prayer which hardly even should be called prayer IMO. I’d recommend to focus the intention of prayer to be to connect the lower self with the higher aspect your mind sees in a deity, the Absolute, or whatever you choose.

work/study: My hours at work were reduced to part time at the very beginning of 2021 due to many severe manic episodes and one severe depressive episode in the months before. I cut my foot while mowing my lawn in the mid/late spring which resulted in me having to work from home for a couple months at even less hours than the 20/week I had been reduced to earlier in the year. I had more manic episodes in the early summer that resulted in me leaving my job. I didn’t work at all from around June to December. I now have a new job which makes about 10-15% less per hour but is much better for me overall than the previous job. My real estate investing business has grown steadily while all of this was going on although my relationship with my business partner is weaker. emotional intelligence: I have learned to relate to emotions in ways I would’ve never really predicted were possible. Old sensations of emotional suffering are recontextualized and at least 90% easier to palate as well as even being quite enjoyable at times. I’m far more aware of emotions and how they work on a sensate level. I have become much more loving and selfless than I used to be. social life: I lost a lot of friends due to my chaotic mental health in 2020, but this year has given me several high-quality friends who relate to me on very deep spiritual, intellectual, and emotional levels. I also have been blessed to be able to start spiritual coaching to a number of individuals which is incredibly rewarding and a great social activity for me. Most of my closest friends are online now as the type of people I can connect with at meaningful levels has become more rare as I have developed spiritually. I ended up rekindling a friendship which was lost at the end of 2020 with someone who I love and appreciate although we cannot connect on my deepest interests. I had to leave my weekly Dungeons & Dragons game due to my instability in the summer. I have now started having online talks with a couple spiritual masters which has been quite amazing. relationships/sex life: I have been single most of the year. There is a beautiful woman from Iraq who is very interested in me who I do care about, but there are many things making that difficult to even try in person. I’ve had a far lower amount of sexual encounters compared to previous years. I’m not too worried about that, but of course regular sex would be nice. family: The mental instability has strained my relationship with my parents and one sibling at points, but overall I have become far closer to my family this year. In many ways my dad and mom are some of my best friends. I hang out with my dad quite frequently. Some of my favorite times are going for drives with my parents (they are divorced, so they are not both with me at the same time) where they drive and I usually end up feeling a large pooling of energy come into my third eye area mostly. It’s a great bonding time for us. I’ve really started to enjoy a lot of my dad’s favorite bands and my mom’s modern Christian gospel music. I got to become a lot closer to my oldest brother who has been debilitated by his schizoaffective disorder while him, my dad, and I played through the Dark Souls series of games together over the course of a few months. It was very hard to connect with him before as he is a very fundamentalist Christian and his mental illness sapped him of enthusiasm and energy, but playing those games with him and seeing him actually a bit happier at times was very special to me. I got to go to Las Vegas to see my sister and nephew which was great. I hardly get to see them. On Christmas Eve I was able to bond with my uncle in Catholic mass which that side of my family has gone to for years as I had finally reduced my judgment to Christians. He was so thoughtful in the way he guided me through all of the traditions of the mass so I could understand what was going on in his spiritual tradition. It was really heart warming to see him give that simple but selfless extra attention to me so I would hopefully see the beauty and love which he has been able to experience through his Catholic faith. Afterward, that whole side of our family gathered at his house, and I had a long conversation with one of my aunts about my mental illness and spirituality which was the first time her and I had ever deeply connected. self-development/spirituality: I really didn’t focus on much self-development other than in the spiritual sphere of things besides starting to improve my fitness in the past few weeks. My spirituality has grown exponentially. The past seven years of spiritual development which was quite engaged and serious is not even 1% of my spiritual development compared to what happened this year. I “experienced” cessation for the first time on May 28th. My life has never been the same since. What happened that day was so beyond my various 5 gram+ mushroom trips or my 10 tab LSD trip that there is no just way to describe the level of increased significance and power of the event compared to those lower awakenings. If I wrote about my spiritual experiences from this year in a comprehensive way, it would take at least hundreds of pages. I’ll just list some of the highlights. -Incredibly deep Bhakti yoga, thousands of times -Giving my entire being to a spiritual entity/guru resulting in my first cessation -Absolute Selfhood (being both the Self and self in a completely embodied way) -Five cessations in 30 minutes -Having a cessation triggered by my mind being obliterated the Infinite Beauty and Divinity of Jesus Christ -Spiritually transferring heat from a stone to my body in below freezing temperatures while acting in accordance with the Holy Spirit -Accessing Absolute Madness -Accessing Absolute Hatred -Accessing Absolute Divinity. This is in many ways still the most significant moment of my life. I only say in many ways because I’ve had so many intense awakenings since that it’s hard to even compare one to another, but this really does take the cake. If I had to just throw a number on it, it was at least 10 or 100 times greater than any of my cessation events which I already stated were indescribably more profound and intense than heroic dose mushroom trips or the 10 tab LSD trip which happened pre-stream entry. -Accessing Absolute Love through an angel crying a benevolent tear into my heart. This happened roughly a minute before I accessed Absolute Divinity. A few minutes afterward, this completely indescribably beautiful entity did the same thing again. -Feeling millions of bodily sensations in roughly a six inch radius area in my legs -Experiencing roughly 10 different hubs of seemingly infinite minds simultaneously -Locking in non-locality, the Boundless Space aspect of the fifth jhana, the Boundless Consciousness aspect of the sixth jhana, nondoership, removing the sensation of gravity pulling me downward, and popping the 360° bubble of vision to where they are all consistently accessible aspects of my moment-to-moment experience completely sober, at all times -Accessing jhanas 1-8 and potentially jhana 9/nirodha samapatti (depending on whose rules and interpretations of the 9th jhana you’re looking at) -Two nuclear-grade heart chakra energetic explosions -Two nuclear-grade crown chakra explosions -Learning how to channel energy to/manipulate/“turn on” the heart chakra, third eye chakra, and crown chakra at will. I’ve learned how to do this with other chakras including one beyond the basic seven, but those three are the ones I’m most skilled with so far. The crown chakra is by far the easiest for odd reasons I won’t get into due to limited time to write. Also, when I say turn on, I’m aware that chakras can’t be completely closed. It’s simply a fitting way to describe what’s happening in a way heavily limited by language. -While I was having an allergic reaction to lidocaine in my foot as it had severely lost circulation which was the most painful event of my life (far worse than having my foot cut open by a lawnmower) that felt like my foot was simultaneously on fire and being soaked in acid, I surrendered completely to death. When I did this, all pain immediately left my body and was replaced by the full body bliss of the Holy Spirit. -My suffering is now reduced by roughly 90-99%. Every day is a magical ride. Not a day goes by without a number of significant and positive spiritual experiences. I can reach states beyond my old heroic dose trips completely sober at times. The states I can reach from one hit of THC or weed often blow those old trips completely out of the water. I can’t even bring myself to smoke dabs anymore as the levels of intensity it brings are so absolutely ridiculous. -Accessing Absolute Time And the list goes on and on, but I don’t see much of a point to adding any more right now. finances: Due to working limited hours, leaving my job, not working for several months, and overspending which occurred during a couple manic episodes, I gained a considerable amount of credit card debt. My credit has also been ruined for now. My finances were sacrificed this year for spiritual development. Without the time off to focus on spirituality, I would’ve been nowhere near where I am today in that regard. I’m not really too worried about it. The spiritual gains were worth it thousands of times over. I still own my own house and business at 26. I haven’t had to go without a single necessity. My parents did help a good amount though to make sure nothing got too bad on this front, so I’m quite thankful and lucky for that. physical activity/eating: My diet has improved a lot in the past month. I’ve started going to the gym and cycling regularly. I had a big aversion to physical activity in the past which has been helped a lot by the spiritual progress. During a few months as I was really starting to change spiritually at a rapid rate, my body started to do a sort of automatic fasting. It actually became really hard work to eat during that period. My appetite went to almost nothing. I had to entice myself with the tastiest junk food just to eat solid things. I relied a lot on meal replacement shakes. Luckily this problem has gone away. I’ve gotten away from eating fast food quite a bit compared to what I used to. hobbies/habits: In the past couple months, I’ve started playing darts and doing photography again. This year I’ve released a lot more hours of video content than ever before. Cycling is also a hobby at times too when I’m not doing it specifically for exercise or transportation. I like to go outside in nature more often now that my physical aversion is reduced. I’m just waiting on better weather in the spring and summer to start camping and doing more outdoors. how would you rate it 1-10? 10/10 or more honestly I’d say ♾/10

I haven’t had this specific thing occur, but feeling like you’re on a psychedelic while sober is quite common as you progress. As long as it’s not messing too much with normal functioning, see it as a good thing. Examine what occurred around that time and the whole day, and see if you can reproduce factors you think might have triggered it on a day you’re free from typical obligations like work, family things, etc. If you can start getting in these states naturally, it should do a lot of good over time as long as you’re safe with things.

“You” got “me” ?