Nickyy

@Joker_Theory Become aware of the present moment. Use your senses fully. Observe the flow of your breathing. Touch something and knowledge it. Become aware of the noises, smells in the room. Don't analyze anything. Don't interpret anything. Observe the silence behind the sounds in the room. Notice how the silence is all pervasive, deep, infinate. Notice the space in which all objects are allowed to be unconditionally . Notice the energy that animates your body. Put your attention on all the objects and then put your attention on the silence and space behind the objects. Notice the difference between the objects and the space and silence. Rest in the silence for a moment. Observe the infinate depth of the silence. Notice that it's omnipresent and unknowable (but paradoxically knowable as it is you ). Then notice how you feel. ?

Probably not, no. Looking for sex from that place is just looking for a substitute for being. But it doesn't take much to come out of a down period. Seconds of time.

@assx95 You can find a lot of freedom from this if you're able to put the whole thing into perspective by living in the present moment, even for just a little while. The attachment seems so real at the moment , but I assure you that it's nothing. But you need to find out for yourself how trivial this thing is, so just become very present in the now. If you're thinking a thought aknowledge your thought, say "ok, this is absolutely true" and show genuine appreciation for your thought. Then "park" the thought by just resting your awareness in the present moment. Do the same with any feeling you become aware of when you rest in the present moment. Just show it aknowledgment and gratitude and then rest with it as part of this moment, now. Stay in the present moment and continue to notice everything that arises in the now. Sounds, smells, thoughts, feelings, sensations, your breath, the silence, the space between everything Just sit and the answer you need will come to you and you will know

Affirmations will complicate your mind. I've made another comment on your newest post that shows you how to disidentify and integrate the pattern so that it stops running your life.

One sign that you're making progress is that you will naturally find the behaviour cringey. That's when you need to be able to stay really present so that you don't get taken over by it again. It will do many things to you to try to trick you into identifying with it again. It will probably create other kinds of drama in your life, so be aware of this potential, if you're present in the moment you will have the resources to make the connection between this pattern and the other parts of your life that don't seem to work or new dramas and "problems" that arise. All problems arise from one source, the egoic mind.

Just be aware of this. Continue to express it but don't identify with it. Soon you will see that it's your ego, a pattern that you made fixed and identified with over time. Just take a non judgemental non attached watchful attitude to the "person" acting this pattern out. Allow it to be and be as present as you can with it. Don't make it into a problem. It's part of your "now" and unless you can learn to disidentify with it you will never heal it. You need to disidentify with it first so that you can see that it's a mechanical object that can change. If it's "you", if it's part of a sense of yourself then you will find it very difficult to change because of the fear of losing part of yourself. Notice your attachment to this story, notice how you secretly like being this way because it gives you a sense of identity and security (of sorts). Just notice and continue to notice and express and integrate and soon it will go away.

@themovement Falsity means to strive for something. When you are just being then your external purpose makes complete sense to you as you're letting in new ideas that come from being aligned with life. I shouldn't really say anymore than this, because you will turn it into a belief. You need to find out for yourself what life wants to do with you. The ego can never understand this It may be that those guys who sat in caves was their external purpose at that time. But that doesn't mean that everyone who contacts being will be sitting in a cave.

The act of talking about an external purpose is part of the false self. You either live a pseudo life as that false self or you live your real life . When you can learn to live your real life your "external" purpose will reveal itself.

@Thalie Its not that everything itself is one or merges into one, it's an understanding and feeling that everything is complete, whole, as it should be. Everything is as it should be and you are also as you should be. That's the feeling. You will know instantly when you're truly in the now, because of that understanding and feeling.

@Thalie Im always in the now, because the now is the only thing there is. There have been a few times that I've been able to understand that time doesn't exist, and those times I felt complete freedom from the ego. The ego was gone, and along with it the fear was gone. There was just the authentic me, nothing had changed except purity of heart. The ego and time makes no sense to me when I'm authentic. You know when you're fully in the now and the ego is gone. It's unmistakable and the world is an entirely different place. You don't have to ask anymore questions because everything is already complete and whole. The problem is being there more consistently. The ego is cunning and usually gets its way. I think a lot of energy is needed at first, which is probably why retreats are a good thing.

I've never met a person who's story turned out the way they planned. That's because the story is called a story, and why we developed spiritual systems to wake future generations up.

Doing comes from being. Being doesn't mean sitting still in silence, it means being yourself and allowing life to live through you and express itself through you. Only that way will your doing have any true meaning and make you happy in life.

Can you see that this is just a story? Point to a "can of worms" .

@7thLetter You have made an identity out of simple, mechanical, impersonal, conditioned biological processes, and now that self is threatened. What would happen for your success if you saw through the identification? Saw that the identification is a phantom created by thoughts? Would there be any fear? You're not in any real danger talking to someone. So your endocrine system shouldn't really be firing up with stress hormones when approaching someone you want to have sex with. It's only sex.

@Key Elements Living in the now is not working for them. Why do you suppose that is?

The key to non attachment is just letting the body live in the moment. Everything that needs to happen will happen. And when circumstances change the body adapts with no clinging to the past. Life is very easy in the now. You get what you want with no effort . But this requires living rather than intellectualizing , even intellectualizing about living in the now

@7thLetter Youre making it a goal rather than just letting life live it's process.

@Identity You said it yourself. Consciousness is prior to the mind. The mind can never understand it, you can only feel it as a reality for you. It's unmistakable, freedom from fear and baggage of the past is a good description. But ultimately your only path is a direct path using meditation. You don't even have to sit to meditate. Just notice a thought, accept it fully without reservation, and then continue to bring your attention into the present moment. Keep doing that and the absolute will reveal itself

@Fede83 Yeah, that's it. Be wary of the trap of trying to improve yourself. This is a contradiction. You should already feel that there is nothing to improve upon if you are understanding enlightenment correctly . That understanding ought to be the basis for how you live your life from now on. If you're trying to improve yourself then you're subtely saying to yourself that who you are now is not enough. That's not self actualisation/ realization. Whatever blessings come will come from not having a goal.

@Flowerfaeiry Noted. But let's put it into perspective. We've got no conclusive evidence that the drug itself is harmful. I and many others went years literally abusing the drug. The number of deaths compared to the number of times a does has been taken is negligible. You yourself took it every day for months on end and had an episode of paranoia and some (temporary?) memory loss? With all this in mind, Is it really reasonable to say that taking small amounts of MDMA for therapeutic purposes poses a high risk?

@Flowerfaeiry That last study you liked, did you even read it? MDMA is almost never taken without other drugs, most notably cannabis. Studies of cannabis without MDMA have provided clear evidence of acute and shortterm effects on attention and memory with possibly the only long-term effects being on frontal attentional networks. In contrast, there is evidence that MDMA does chronically impair complex memory tasks (hippocampus) and, in heavier users, higher executive information processing (frontal cortex) as well. Much of the evidence is compromised by the fact that short-term residual effects of cannabis and sometimes even acute effects cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, synergistic effects of cannabis and MDMA may explain effects on cognition. Circumstantial evidence correlating total lifetime dose of MDMA with cognitive measures does imply that MDMA is more likely to be the culprit than interaction with cannabis, but in the absence of evidence from pure groups this cannot be known for certain. The cognitive impairment associated with MDMA and cannabis is not large relative to normal cognitive variability among individuals. Nevertheless, it may be sufficient to affect scholastic performance or those embarking on intellectually challenging careers and may become more manifest as neuronal reserve diminishes with age. Conversely, impairments may resolve with prolonged abstinence. If deficits in MDMA users are indeed a clinical manifestation of serotonergic dysfunction, as some biological studies would suggest, this is cause for concern that users may have increased risk of other psychiatric conditions with strong serotonergic aspects, including depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, impulsivity, aggression, and obsessivecompulsive disorder They are saying that they don't know, they can't know, the confounding variables are too many to make any serious claim. It's just all theories and loose correlations. The study you provide only shows how difficult it was at the time of publishing (2003) to pin any association on the drug. I've underlined the important parts of the text.

Of course I'm biased. We all are. Yes everyone is different, but the evidence suggests that there is no causal relationship between MDMA and any symptom. It might be useful to understand what the Bradford hill criteria is, which will put your belief into perspective. It's not the drug that is the problem, it's more likely the person taking it. To say that the drug causes memory problems is just not true. There are a lot of people who want to shut down the use of MDMA on a grand scale. Rather than policing it (which there is no budget for) politicians can create propaganda with these studies. You mentioned that if you keep digging you can find many more studies. Sure you can. But you have just told me that you did a quick Google search to support your confirmation bias , which says that you don't really have any education on the subject, certainly not enough to debunk the study I showed you that shows there is no evidence to support condemning the drug. To say that MDMA directly caused your paranoid episode also tells us a lot about your degree of critical thinking thinking skills. In my mind I really don't see any correlation between MDMA use and memory loss. And because I've got a 2019 paper that also says there is no evidence to support any claim that the drug is harmful, I'm happy with my perspective at the moment I haven't found any compelling proof that MDMA is harmful, which makes me concerned about the level of "certainty" of some of the claims people are making on this thread about how dangerous the drug is. Hmm, not really buying that

@Flowerfaeiry Please note I'm not advocating drug abuse. I'm using my story as a way of discussing MDMA and it's long term effects. I just got warned by a mod, therefore I'm responsible for making myself clear here.

Yeah, that's the formation of the ego, the adaptation to events rather than just allowing your feelings to be there and naturally grow and develop. Nice that you're not attached to the adaptation nor the emotions. That awareness and non attachment will heal your mind and the ego will just eventually go away because it's not needed anymore

@Flowerfaeiry The study you posted, from 2000 btw, doesn't really tell us much except that they found associations in animal studies and this raised a theoretical concern about the observational studies done on humans. A bit of a weak paper, and a bit irrelevant now in 2019, almost 20 years after your paper was published. Got anything more substantial and upto date?