Eph75

These days essentially just "do nothing". Used to do body scans and stuff but these days I just focus on the blackness "behind" the visual field of closed eyes, where I find I can "get lost". Sometimes I focus on my hands or body just because it's fun to be in a state where the body or body parts feel detached from being. I'm hitting the 2 year mark. As mentioned before, 40 min per day in one sitting. When I did 2 hours I did two 1 hour sittings, one in the morning and one in the evening. "Almost", I allow myself to slack off max one day per week, that's more a result of allowing myself to sleep in. I get up 5 AM on week days and have a strict morning routine. I don't get up until a bit later in the weekend and if it would for some reason turn "late" I allow myself to not meditate. And that's perfectly fine, it's not set in stone. Yes, alone. No, haven't been to any retreats although I did play with the idea of going on a 10 day meditation retreat but I've been reluctant to due to next answer. I had a dark stretch where sitting was a challenge and by back and body ached a lot. I got into a rut where I experimented with sitting on different materials and so on with the goal to be comfortable with sitting on the floor so that it would lay ground for above mentioned meditation retreat. That in itself warped my mind into bad sittings, a self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing. Now I sit in my sofa but I'm sitting on a meditation cushion so that I raise my bottom/pelvis and get a slight forward slope instead of otherwise the butt sinking into the sofa. I'm not concerned about doing it theoretically "right" these days, the results and how deep you get into the meditation is far more important than sitting in a certain way. So, with this I've let go of the meditation retreat ideas. At least for now. And the aches and mental distraction from needing to sit in a certain way has removed themselves. Same thing here, I sit with my hands on a large soft cushion that i have in my lap, hands about 45 degrees upwards which is a very relaxed position. I find myself not comfortable when messing about with the hands in more theoretical positions. Breath - not anymore. I did in the beginning to distract the mind from straying about. That's not needed anymore. Third eye, yes, at times on and off and parts of meditation. Nothing set in stone, I don't believe in anything too static. Just going with the flow, do what works and shift back and forth.

@Lila Yes, it's not a "race", it was just a figure of speech, a "marathon" analogy - being a "long race" and not a "short sprint" Replace it with "continuing the work indefinitely".

From a developmental growth perspective there is not really any going back, but in development you do have stretches into territory that is beyond your center of gravity and you can spend time there, but just like you say, when shit hits the fan and circumstances give you a good slap in the face you get pulled back to the level in which your gravity of sense-making lies. As @WhatAWondefulWorld says, it's about resilience, not giving up and accepting that these kind of things take time. You will also have to become friends with "plateauing out" from time to time, and just as you've experienced, something that look like regression - which is a return from more or less temporary modes of "stretched performance". Finding ourselves on a "plateau" can be demoralizing especially as development when in flow sometimes can seem like being caught by an avalanche and you sort of is along for the ride without making much if any effort. Then a plateau hits and you wonder what happened, if that was it and you might end up giving up. Not good. Befriend the quirks of development, we're in a marathon and the only thing that matters is to not drop out of the race.

You can't "run away" from you shadow. You can run and it may feel good in that moment as you are being distracted with the going-ons, but sooner or later you catch a glimpse of that shadow, and it is as real as it was before you started running. That is why. You can have flow at times, pushing forward. But you have to stop at times, to face your past and shed those tears. Process what is found within that shadow so that it eventually can leave and you can go on with a "less dense and dark" shadow. Once you get rid of (accept or let go) the most emotionally challenging parts of your shadow, it will be much easier to continue working on the remainder. It will be more delightful than it will be emotionally challenging/upsetting. Leaning more towards previously unknown aspects than know pains.

Absolutely

Any amount is better than no amount. Yet, you are not going to experience the same by sitting 15 minutes as you will when you push past the hour. It changes you in a way that you will benefit from also in shorter sittings. As always there is a correlation between the effort and the outcome. But it's of course not just about time, it's also about quality. I started out with 15-20 minutes and it had a certain effect. Then I pushed to an hour and it blow my mind. Then I started with two one hour sittings per day for some time and it was amazing but consumed a lot of time and interfered with life with wife and kids so I've reduced down to 40 minutes in the morning. By doing so I've definitively lost something but at the same time pushing the limits a bit has increased the quality and outcome of those 40 minutes. Do what you feel is right, start with building up a very strong habit of meditating daily and from there adjust the time as best fits your lifestyle. But I would strongly recommend interweaving that with longer sittings once in a while, just to push how long you think you can sit and maintain concentration. Sitting is a mind game, you have to beat (let go of) the mind to kill the time.

"Smart" isn't about IQ alone, it's more about what kind of outcomes (decisions, understanding of the world, responses and actions) you are able to produce for yourself, which involves all of the intelligences - and more - not just IQ, and how these combined works with your cognitive development so that you have a high ability to sense, make sense and produce such sensible responses - presenting yourself in a "smart" way. Someone with moderate IQ can make "perfect sense" and create high quality outcomes while someone with [percieved] high IQ could be a psychopathic mess yet turning up as something that would be percieved as "smart" such as having high ranking positions in companies, success, money and so. We react more against people trying to be "smart" than noticing people who are smart and just acts on their capabilities but make little noise in the process. E.g. someone with high ability to convey information in such a way that the reciever percieves that information as a result of their own sense making, making them feel smarter - versus - the "smart" besserwisser that hands over the correct answers and making others feel dumber or inferior in that process. At the end of the day, who cares about being smart when what matters is how you show up and present yourself to the world. Release any attachment to needing to be smart and comparing yourself against people that you deem smart as correlation between IQ and showing unhealty behaviors. Those feelings are probably produced by your judgement towards others and the cognitive dissonance created by your desire to be smart and your fear of being smart based on that misjudgement of others "smartness".

Spirituality's equivalence effect-wise to that of Facebook/Instagram likes - a form of instant gratification? We tend to want to take the quick route and cut corners whenever we can so that we get what we want "now" and in the process the long route starts looking less and less attractive. I'm not labeling those choices in any way, just looking at it from a phenomena perspective it could and probably explains at least a part of that obsession linking in to the production of dopamine and serotonin production from whatever positive effects you get from that usage, and the craving to have more, fast. Even if it would be argued that you don't get addicted to psychedelics there's a second order effect on e.g. self-esteem that is highly addictive. E.g. you "become someone important/of interest" in conversations like these and so on, ego related/oriented effects that are easily overlooked.

You could always start paying attention to how these "low consciousness activities" affect you, general mood, motivation, how it activates your self-talk, what that self-talk is telling yourself, what kind of thoughts it gets hung up and so on. Not least, how all of the above affects your ability to focus and how your meditation (assuming that you meditate) is affected. Then stop for a while and notice what the difference is. After that you know for sure what the first hand experience of the activities are and what kind of implications they have on your being. Getting that first hand experience makes it easier to find motivation to change your lifestyle, but still, by no means, is it easy to do so. My own experience is that what I would call "low consciousness activities" are very toxic, but it's not a black/white, do/don't subject, it's related to amount/time. It's also very interrelated to how your mind is functioning, how you relate to guilt, shame, pressure, emotions and so on, as what you call "low consciousness activities" you've already categorized as "bad" and falling to the temptation of those will trigger such feelings of guilt, shame and so on, and it's not very hard to see how detrimental these feelings are when not understood and handled in a masterful way. How would, for example, these kind of activities affect you if your relation to them completely changed, e.g. if you managed to redefine them from being "bad" to being "good" or maybe more realistically "neutral". Is it in the first-order experience of these "low consciousness activities" that the toxicity lies? Or is it in second- or third-order effects there the problem lies? What is the problem, really? Is it possible that you would remain unaffected if you related to them in a different way? And if so, is it the activities that are "toxic" or is it something in your the way you related that is the "true toxicity"? Calls for some exploring

@Thewritersunion Absolutely, the known states and tiers are only limited by the currently - and always - limited human mind.

So, the thing is that you can't read or conceptualize yourself into developmental growth, this has to happen by integration - i.e. by walking the talk and living the changes by challenging your limitations. Through conceptualization you can create a facade through which you act, that is as long as you understand and recognize scenarios you have patterns to which you have a "stage behavior" that you "should" live up to. That's just being an actor on stage, being a jester to the audience so to speak. You have to develop into the stages, integrating them. You can definitively get pulled into a stage, e.g. being born in the western world where the center of gravity is at a particular stage, but since you get pulled into that stage so quickly, it's not going to be fully integrated. Pushing forward without first addressing shadows which are negative sides of or lack of integration of previous stages will create some cognitive dissonance as you will end up thinking that you are "higher stage" material but at the same time you are unknowingly suffering from "lower stage limitation". Really, the best thing that you can do is to read up on the model and get the best understanding that you can of what each stage, bottom up, where you have limitations that prevent you from developing and/or integrating previous stage. One of the fundamental problems with this - theoretically and from personal experience - is that you are not able to see nor understand the spiral before you have reached second tier. Pre-2nd-tier it will still be hugely beneficial when focusing and working on the limitations of the stages from a personal POV - integration. The whole awakening experience with stepping outside of yourself and experiencing watching yourself from somewhat of a third or fourth person perspective is hugely helpful here as you have to have a significant developmental shift in order to step outside of the limitations of pre-2nd-tier stages and "watch" yourself from a detached and distanced place in order to notice those limitations in yourself and also to be able to address them. The feeling to want to "skip stages" is in fact something that is related to the very limitations of pre-tier-2 stage.

I'd say no. Stages are not the same as states. Any stage can have awakening/enlightenment, that has nothing to do with stages. A permanent awakening is still not a stage leap. Stages have to be climbed and can't be skipped. Rushing through stages is possible, but it's likely to create shadow issues.

@noip What emotions are triggered inside you, here, right now, from this thread, and why? Remember, people don't make you angry, it's you who make yourself angry. Pointing towards something external is only to look for blame and justification which works as avoiding personal responsibility - and - prevents you from finding out the real reason, which is inside you.

Stop for a moment and really look at what is happening here.. Maybe there is a trigger here that is calling attention to itself? The hard part about personal growth is to lower our defenses and allow ourselves to explore what hasn't been before, that which has been accepted as truth or that which has been dismissed as not matching such beliefs that poses those truths. @noip There is something in your post about ghosting and "used to think.. no responsibility" that tells us that you do know that you have been doing this. I would explore that further and see where that leads, how that correlates with your experience that you posted about here - and - try stepping outside of yourself to allow yourself to better observe what emotions and defenses get triggered in that process. In the end, it's not about pointing fingers towards something about him nor pointing fingers towards something within you that leads to rejecting exploration of yourself. It's all about growing understanding of a situation (could be any situation) and how we relate to that situation, regardless where it takes us. Doing so with as much curiosity as we can muster. I would start with questions like; "what kind of expectations have I created for him?", "is there a chance that I have painted a picture that has been misleading to him" and so on. Also revisiting this: You acknowledge that you "used to ghost on people". Is there a chance that you did that this time as well, in a more subtle form? And maybe knowingly so? And maybe most provocative of all, what kind of feelings has ghosting been triggering within you? Is there a chance that it is somehow related to a feeling of pleasure? There question don't necessarily need to be answered here, it's more about contemplating questions than needing to answer them. Those kind of questions are very useful for exploration. To be able to stay with such provocative inquiries without getting triggered (much, because trigger it will). In such a moment, to refrain from feeling accused, victimized or lashing back at someone (or self) is truly a magnificent super-power Remember, you're looking for help to lead you to greater understanding, we're here to help That might mean others asking questions that you may need to think about and not that's not necessarily what you want to hear. And by no means does such questions, posted by some random person, imply they/us knowing anything; the situation, something about him, or you. We know nothing but our own interpretation of limited information that arises out of our own biases. @Preety_India It takes two to let go. The final word is not important, but notice how it makes us feel if the final word is ours, when if it's something not relevant as "I'm not going to waste anymore time debating", "Now let go" or "Can you drop it and can we move on?" Seeing when other are caught in a loop is useful. Speaking of super-powers, seeing when we ourselves should let go is nothing but that

Just finished watching a documentary I found interesting about overcoming drug addiction through psychedelics. Might be of interesting for you guys. "Dosed" http://imdb.com/title/tt9787524/

You should never worship anyone. Speaking of careful. Be careful to make definitive statements. It assumes knowing and the one thing we can know is that we can never really know anything. I have no opinions about Sadhguru btw.

At the end of the day, we're never ever going to know anything from conceptualizing and speculating. Only from confrontation and asking the right questions in the right way leads to true (or less inaccurate) understanding. Unless we are willing to attack that "beast", trying to figure out the whys and the hows make little sense, other that being distractions that are going to end up strengthening our own egos, as the answers are likely to end up being beneficial to self. So, the way forward is either practicing attacking "beasts" - or - practice letting go. Regardless outcome it amounts to growth. Shit don't make sense, so trying to make sense of shit on your own still amounts to... shit.

Touché!

This strikes the nerve of growing awareness; to stop looking outwards, turning inwards and start building up understanding and compassion of self.

@kindayellow No, being alone with your thoughts should not be equivalent to setting yourself on fire, tearing your world apart. The inability to be alone with our thoughts in a healthy manner is what sets our world on fire. Distraction is the defense mechanism that prevents us, in our unhealthy state of being, from setting ourselves "on fire". What if being alone and in equinimity with thoughts is the way to go? And how do you get there? What ideas are there that needs to be let go of that is acting as fuel to your ruminations?

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Distraction is the easy way out - and avoidance of growth. Face your demons.

This is amazingly easy and it's amazingly amusing to see how people struggle with this, something that is trivial in the context of actualization. Go to bed same time every night, get up at the same time every morning, never sleep in, patterns shall arise and you shall awaken before the alarm rings. If you want to make it easier, when the alarm rings, put on previously prepared clothes and go for a nice walk. No hesitance, just do it. If you don't have time, set the alarm earlier to create the time. A few paces and you're completely awake. Choose not to be a victim of circumstances.

@Jed Vassallo Very cool stuff!

@LordFall Yes. Furthermore, there is a significant level of amusement in all of this, the trick is it see through and beyond the packaging and not allow it to lead you astray; the content of the review, the content in this thread, the content of the minds at play, the content of your mind. It's all a big joke. Existence that is, so why not surrender and join in with the laughter? But also this thread is what can be expected from the typical [replace with description of self].

Not knowing the depth of the toxicity in this, but from what I've read in the different threads you have started about your past relationship, it sounds like a volatile situation. Whatever happens, make sure you stay safe.