BipolarGrowth

Improved treatment, especially in psych wards, would be a great thing to have, but it is realistically hard to improve these systems. Doctors, nurses, and other staff often have to react to situations based on worst case scenarios for the safety of the other patients and staff. It’s very hard to predict how someone in an intense mental state will react, especially when they are already showing signs of resistance.

The best way to stay out of the psych ward would be to get regular treatment from a psychiatrist and see how that goes. The psychiatrist will likely give you lower doses of the meds they’d force you to take in the psych ward anyway. The only way you can be forced to go to the psych ward in the United States is if you are perceived as a threat to yourself or others. All other situations will require you to sign yourself in. Usually you’ll sign yourself in for 3 days, but beware that they can keep you after that point essentially as long as the doctor thinks it’s necessary. If you see a psychiatrist on your own, you will have a lot more say in what medications you take.

Psychedelics can be very effective at reducing depressive symptoms in the short term. I can’t speak for ketamine as I’ve not tried it, but the fact that it is an FDA-approved treatment for depression should tell you enough. One or a few studies showing opposite results of other studies is pretty common.

Stop lying, and there’s no need to cope with it.

@Thought Art hopefully this serves as a reminder ?

I’ve had an interest in Taoism for quite some time and have listened to a Tao Te Ching audiobook many times, but beyond that, there is not much I know about Taoism and it’s specific practices and teachings. Even though I have a lot less knowledge of Taoism compared to other systems, I still feel like it has contributed a lot to my path. I’d like to understand it a bit more. If any of you know of Taoist teachers, specific practices, resources to read, watch, or listen to that have proved to be helpful for you, I’d really appreciate it if you’d share those here. Feel free to talk here about your experiences practicing within this tradition and any insights or impressions you’ve gained from it. If anyone knows of good retreat options, feel free to share those as well.

Wearing a realistic gorilla costume while standing in a clearing in the Pacific Northwest should do the trick.

One way I’d describe vipassana would be that it is like using a microscopic precision in awareness to gain insight into the nature of experience. A good short description of vipassana I’ve heard is “to penetrate and see clearly”. Vipassana has a certain element of intimate and energized observation. Mindfulness and being present is a great foundation, and it is crucial for vipassana practice. It can take a step beyond those as well. It is gaining clarity into the way things are now at a finer level. Vipassana practice can be done by also using a starting point of contemplation on the three characteristics to inform your meditation session of what you’re looking for. A quite simple way to do this would be to remind yourself “impermanence” in your mind for a moment before intentionally witnessing the changing, fluxing nature of phenomena as the focus of your session. You can think of this characteristic of impermanence as the focus object of your meditation. Rather than focusing awareness on a particular object or grouping of sensations like in samatha, you can instead focus on this meta-property of experience and see this property at work in any and all phenomena. It works pretty similarly for non-self and dissatisfaction.

Spiral dynamics seems less important as time goes on for me. It’s a cool idea, but it’s pretty arbitrary and difficult to verify any individual’s claims of being a specific level. On top of this, it’s a cultural model not quite calibrated for individuals the way people love to use it here.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

You’re not going to die from allowing the state to subjectively deepen. That doesn’t mean whatever chemical you are taking couldn’t do some damage though. But these are mostly separate matters. The overall idea is that you are just allowing fear and discomfort to hold you back while feeding yourself a BS story that you’re going to physically die.

Here’s an example of what I ate one day for 217g protein, 320g carbs, and 76g fat. Lean meats, protein powder, Greek yogurt, eggs, fish, and protein powder mixed with oatmeal (actually tastes delicious) were my common foods to be at or above 200g of protein each day. You’ll also notice powdered peanut butter there too which is a good way to add flavor and some protein for not that many calories.

I’m happy to break some of it down for you if you’d like, but I’m not sure exactly what you want answered based off your post. If you wanna write some to-the-point questions about the specifics of his system, I’d be happy to take a shot at answering. There are some others on here who are pretty familiar with his style, terms, and maps who can probably answer as well. I wouldn’t worry too much about the maps until you feel yourself to have come into contact with states which match the descriptions pretty closely. Also, I wouldn’t be worried about getting stuck at one stage. If you practice a technique such as vipassana consistently, you should continue to make progress over time. Daniel is a medical doctor, and his teaching style reflects that. It’s going to be far more technical and detailed than the vast majority of other teachers you’ll come across.

It’s hard to tell if it’s the same thing, but it being your most intense awakening experience is a good sign at least. When I saw it, it was so stunning that I actually couldn’t perceive the source of it. I could only see the light around the outermost edge. Certainly the most breathtaking moment of my entire life. 10 tabs of LSD was like 1/1000th of the intensity of that moment.

Well those are going to be states that are usually pretty personalized. The one I was referring to for myself was something I call Absolute Divinity, but this term won’t really mean much to anyone as it was a pretty unique personal awakening to something which isn’t as commonly discussed. You can picture it as “seeing the white light” while already built upon the foundation of previous types of awakening that I’ve mentioned as well as others. Usually our verbal descriptions of one state versus another will not carry the same weight to those interpreting them. It’d almost be more accurate for me to assign numbers. Why I say these things are personalized is because a state beyond the more common ones will often combine various realizations, and by the time you have this many sophisticated parts to an experience like I’m pointing to, you’ll realize that no one out there is likely to experience such a combination just by sheer probability alone. I imagine this is similar in structure at least to some of the things we hear from Leo. When he says God Realization, it’s likely far more than just the initial realization that you are God and plays on a lot of personal and more unique realizations he’s had in the past culminating to a greater peak experience as well as peak in understanding. I don’t really like to spend much time talking about these sorts of states that arise because the chance you can actually convey what you’d like to to someone is quite low and would take a lot of time and honesty required of both parties involved. As soon as someone has an attitude of “oh I see what you mean” or is trying to judge the profundity of your experience too quickly, too many ego games are playing at that point for anything productive to happen from the discussion.

Edit: Some people seem to be talking about cessation in a lot of ways other than what the original post is talking about. Here’s a description of it from Daniel Ingram which clarifies and captures what this term means: “Fruition (phala in Pali) is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no awareness, no background, no foreground, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. “Reality” stops cold and then reappears. Thus, this is impossible to comprehend, as it goes completely and utterly beyond the rational mind and the universe. In “external time” (if we were observing the meditator) this stage typically lasts only an instant (though the question of “duration” will be addressed below). It is like an utter discontinuity of the space-time continuum with nothing in the unfindable gap, exactly like what happens when someone edits out a frame or sequence of frames of a movie. It is not that you see a blank screen for a while where they edited the frames out, instead that part of the movie is just not there.“ I will say that I’ve experienced both although Leo will certainly claim that I haven’t accessed God Realization before as he says this with essentially everyone. Regardless, cessation was far more important to my spiritual development personally. The instant before my first cessation was by far the highest state I had ever experienced up to that point, but cessation was what made the difference. There is something truly transformative about seeing experience and everything and anything you’ve ever known disappear. It can give particularly solid insight into the fact that there really isn’t a self or even Self that lasts and can be accurately identified with. Experiencing myself as God was transformative in that moment and maybe some transformation power and momentum lingered for a bit, but it is essentially just a peak experience (albeit an incredibly amazing one that CANNOT be imagined before it happens). Cessation on the other hand was the spark that started a chain reaction which caused deeper and deeper AUTOMATIC insight into experience. My baseline modes of perception were forever changed and enhanced after that event. The first cessation is in some people’s interpretations seen as stream entry described in Buddhism which is essentially you entering the stream to be carried by the current toward full awakening no matter what you do. I think it’s certainly possible that cessation did so much for me and was seen as such a high thing at the time partially because I had already built a foundation with God Realization and other insights. Maybe if I had experienced cessation first and had God Realization afterward, I would interpret God Realization as higher due to that event first occurring upon a greater spiritual foundation. There is also no one true God Realization or cessation. How either of these or practically any other spiritual insight and experience occur relies a lot on how far you’ve gone in your previous history of practice. Insight is something which builds upon itself to further and further degrees. I will also clarify that, in my opinion, the sixth jhana is not God Realization proper. It has some of the elements of God Realization there, but it is not quite as full and miraculous based on my experience and interpretations. Sixth jhana is a direct feeling while in a formless state that You extend to and contain everything in an infinite distance spanning in every direction. It’s pretty similar, but it’s not quite the same as the feeling that You are unquestionably God. I guess the point of all of this is to say that BOTH of these realizations are integral for maximum spiritual progress and that they can be incredibly complimentary and can build into even greater personalized realizations and states that you’ll be able to discuss with practically no one once you’re at that point. My subjective ranking of peak states and insights has things beyond both God Realization and cessation, but it’s important to remember that you can’t judge one person’s awakening against another’s with any validity. You can only judge states you have experienced against others you also have experienced, and even then it’s likely that your rankings of one thing as better than another is going to be a bit inaccurate as you can’t truly hold the two or more realizations in their fullness directly next to each other to compare them.

Pretty sure you’re around the optimal age for having an attractive appearance for a man. Sure, maybe you’d seem creepy to SOME 18 year olds, but why would you even want to be with a woman that young at this point? I also don’t understand why it’s unfair that younger people have some advantages over you in strength when you had those exact same age-related advantages when you were their age? They will also experience all of the same disadvantages that come with aging. This sounds about as fair of a situation as life is ever going to give. It sounds like you’re getting pulled around a bit too much by negative thinking which is just making your life less enjoyable.

1. Buy a reliable vehicle 2. Come as close as possible to meeting the elite strength standards on exrx.net 3. Try to go on a meditation retreat but then push it off until the next year once it’s seen that all factors of existence relating to such a thing are not perfectly aligned 4. Spend more time with my mom I can’t wait ?

Disciplined structure of practice and fluidity in habits go hand in hand in this work. I think a combination of the two according to the seasons of one’s life will produce the best results, based on my experience at least.

When you say God in the context of awakening and a Christian says God, two very different meanings are being conveyed. I don’t think it’s wise to try to mix Christianity with nonduality. Christianity has some nondual-esque things about it, but it is far from being nonduality. I actually think some of the most valuable things Christianity brings to the table are lost or reduced when people attempt to mix it too much with nonduality. One of those being a sense of humility. It takes a while for people to mature past the point that awakening to themselves as God does not amplify the ego to a staggering degree both on gross and subtle levels. Usually that maturation process includes a whole lot of blundering and rolling metaphorical 1s on a 20-sided die.

This does sound worth a try.

This is very accurate according to my musings. We are helplessly consciousness acting as it will.

Let’s be honest. We’re not starseeds, previous incarnations of Buddhas, or any other ego-aggrandizing bullshit. We’re simply spiritual nerds on the internet. And that’s a pretty awesome thing by my book! For some reason, or rather more likely a myriad of different reasons, we had an openness to and interest in this work and that is the biggest factor. We have a sort of metaphysical nose about us spiritual nerds that sniffed some fringe and wacky stuff on the horizon when we learned a bit about spirituality, and due to our innate desire for such odd scents, we couldn’t help ourselves but throw ourselves head first down the rabbit hole.

I’ve had good results with this channel in the past.