BipolarGrowth

I’d appreciate a video from your perspective regarding the misconceptions people have about awakening vs. the reality. Too many people both push and buy into a magic pill mentality IMO.

From the perspective of awakening & higher consciousness insights I’ve had, yes. What’s even more important is that your ego is in the captain’s chair for determining your direct experience and where that goes unless you’re in some horrific situation. The video you watch, the spiritual practice you do, how you treat others, it all impacts how far you can take things. You’re playing the game, and you are the game. Respect and love the game to level up in a pleasant way. The other choices have been tried, and there’s a reason humanity rejects them as ideals compared to spirituality done right.

You can become completely disconnected from thought and operate quite well in life. There’s also nothing wrong with thought itself. Think of it like this. Monkey mind is like leaving your weed whacker on in your garage making noise all night. When it makes sense to use it, use it. That might be 12 hours or 30 minutes. It depends. When it is causing more harm than good, learn to turn it off.

Is the answer to this question the answer that’s going to really settle things for you? It’s not a bad track to go down at least IMO whether it’s meant to be or just randomness and free will. Go for bigger fish.

I like this guy’s combination of those voices in this spiritually-focused song. You might like it.

Guide to Contemplation for Enlightenment Realizations in the 21st Century Why do I want realizations? Realizations change your core insight on the most important parts of “Present Moment Experience” as it occurs for you. This is done in a way that is deep enough to lock a certain level of permanent insight into you which you won’t really fall below unless we are looking at brain injury or serious survival conditions. This more or less permanent level of insight can help you to see some rather radical shifts in your baseline consciousness. Your natural potential for awakening and other abilities is linked pretty closely to the amount of insight you always have access to. The core of the guide is rather simple. It is best to start with a strong basis of nondual teachings. Next, you’ll want to meditate, use a light dose of a psychedelic (I prefer THC personally - the goal is not to have some giant trip unless you get there with your own contemplative skills), or do some other similar activity to generate a “fluidity in consciousness” before starting contemplation. If your method isn’t changing your consciousness enough, the chance you’ll have a deep realization decreases. If you have too deep of a meditative or psychedelic experience before you really get going, you probably won’t have what I personally view as a realization. You want to be in that middle spot between a tripping-level experience and normal. You can try contemplating aloud. This helps me get into “no mind” states easier which can be helpful. I had one of my most effective and important realizations this way. You can still get the main benefits of no mind if you’re the contemplation quietly in your head, so don’t worry much if you can’t try speaking aloud. The other parts of the video are focused on how contemplation has triggered two of my best realizations and how that transformed everything pretty much for me.

Enlightenment isn’t really definable, but I do see confidence as a huge factor. Not only will a stronger penetration of the illusion make one more sure in most cases, living as if you are enlightened makes you more susceptible to having that experience/life through Law of Attraction, psychology, and maybe other things. You also then have to go through examining yourself versus other enlightened people and standards if you’re going to try to be honest with yourself. You eventually will see that as much as an answer your flavor of enlightenment was, you have many places left to grow and improve. There are plenty of other systems which still see you as rather unskillful or even wholly unenlightened.

I never said I wasn’t using technology. I’ve realized that the hard formless aspect of J5 & J6 that people use to characterize them as actually being fully formless are not the most important part of the experience. I don’t have enough experience of J7 to say whether it follows this as well. I’m not good at cultivating the formless aspects of these intentionally. I have had a number of experiences which triggered J5 and especially J6 for me to show me the formless aspect of the experience too. I really enjoy the aspect of boundless space & consciousness while still having some form. It’s one of the most accessible interesting states for me. Within a couple seconds I can amplify and tap into the sensations of space and see it ultimately fall away in a sense and become boundless, and within 5-10 make the shift to feeling more connected to where it matches what I found in my hard J6 experiences just with form being there or not being there not affecting the designation of “boundless consciousness” still being true. I’m still interested in the hard formless aspect of Jhana, but I don’t look at Jhana as worth pursuing in the typical Buddhist way of doing them in a sequence for hours. J8 for sure and it might even be said J9 came to me effortlessly doing spirituality on my terms. There are many roads to these different outcomes.

I don’t think this is what Leo meant when he said to imagine your mom came from an egg. I’ve had stuff pretty much equally as crazy in my direct experience though, so who am I to judge?

Nobody knows most likely. There are those who think that they know. What will happen in your next dream? My challenge to you is to live a life and develop enough understanding to where it does not matter much to you. Then you’re finally free to live. An existence in the shadow of death is not life.

Spirituality does not cure many mental illnesses. Spirituality can even make many of them worse from a typical survival perspective. I’m sure plenty of those things you put in the top post can work to degrees, but I’ve been fooled into thinking I had cured something which others claimed you could cure just to find symptoms come back eventually. Many mental illnesses also function as spiritual gifts when some things have been cleared up. They are just characterized as illness as these people don’t fit well into modern culture and belief systems. This isn’t for all illnesses, just some.

Make some serious spiritual progress, and you will probably have some good run-ins with suffering. The shirt off in the winter thing is a good idea IMO if you’re already thinking about it. I did it too once. One time I recorded for like 2 hours outside when we had a polar vortex, and it was so cold the police pulled over to stop me. Good times.

There were still some sensations, but they were pretty light. It wasn’t a hard 5th Jhana by any means.

If I remember right, I had some relaxing music on. It either strobed a bit as far as when I would notice it at all or remained in the background. Eyes were closed. Pure black in the whole visual field. No color whatsoever.

The appearance of an experiencer is false. The appearance of no experiencer is false. The present moment experience is experienced. Experience is occurring. A subject or no subject within experience is not the point and improvable.

Enlightenment is 10% direct experience and 90% confidence.

At this point, I highly doubt anyone can do this to the specific degree you describe. It’s more likely medical science will get there first.

Living in “different realities” doesn’t make things any more or less stable in any way we can know. I’ve experienced this insight. It’s very partial. There are aspects to it which make us still live in the same reality. Those realities you imagine are only taking place in yours anyway. It’s actually all your reality. They take place exactly how you experience them to. There’s no such thing as a reality outside of yours in any way you can imagine. But the opposite is also true because that’s what is shown in your reality. Haha. I probably haven’t helped. The thing that’s partial about your insight that makes it not scary to me is that I know the battle of opposing ideas which it is constructed on never ends. This makes fearing one aspect of it, even if it’s the True or Absolute side in your mind, completely pointless and funny. When God only occurs in my Present Moment Experience from my experience, why would I fear God? When a subjective reality only occurs in its own reality, why fear the loss or gain of other realities? You’ve already been experiencing the totality of actual or even imaginary realities that you could ever be said to access? Present moment experience is still 100% of what present moment experience can know from its own perspective. Nothing changes. There are no less realities to you than before.

If you don’t enjoy it in some way, you won’t do it enough for it to work on you. Let this go for a while, and in a couple weeks, try using a regular focus object such as your breath or a repeating sound in the room to pay attention to instead of the thoughts. You can also try guided and music meditations starting out.

What happens when self deceived people open their minds? They become self deceived in new ways which might look like they learned or know more. Open yourself up to new experiential possibilities and try to set yourself up to experience them after some practice. Open yourself to more or higher quality sources of information. Trust your own intuition and contemplation. Maybe you know your truth and experiences better than the information source does. There are holes in every theory and teaching. Not Buddha, not Jesus, you are the final judge of Truth. Everything is being judged and filtered through humanity whether it’s theirs or yours by the time you can get back to a state where you can think about any of this which is still where you will spend most of your time.

Neither material nor immaterial while being both. In Christianity, it is said again and again that God is set apart. This is what brings us to a greater infinity within our experience right now. God is beyond these categories while including them. You have to be able to see more and more paradox and how it works. This being neither existence nor nonexistence is my favorite pointer a lot of the time. Whether true or untrue, it has gotten me pretty far in contemplation and results.

Consciousness is a human invention by the same accord.

According to the AI named Staples which has no consciousness but IS consciousness.

I’ve been a rock with consciousness. Seriously. But I wasn’t really a rock nor was I not a rock. I was contemplating how a rock or immaterial matter would reach enlightenment if it had impermanence as the only of the three characteristics which it would have to work with. I was deeply visualizing being a rock as much as possible. I saw how this would eventually lead to no self by impermanence constantly changing what the rock was. Then the obvious next step from my perspective was to see how that rock could become a living being with conscious capacities similar to a human. You are already a TON of conscious rocks right now if we are speaking of the human being aspect of your present moment experience. So there’s another strange loop/paradox. This was a great thing to contemplate and visualize. I reached what I called for myself Ultimate Reality within 15-30 minutes of seriously doing this from the perspective of the three characteristics in Buddhism then listening to the Diamond Sutra.

I experienced what I considered the 6th Jhana the other night with essentially no perception of objects. Does this sound like 7th Jhana to you? The main time I got to what I consider 7th Jhana, things were very fine and hard to perceive.