r0ckyreed

That may be all well and good guys. But how do you deal with the fact that you still have to think high quality thoughts in order function in society and create something meaningful? If you don’t spend time contemplating, how are you gonna produce insight?

So is Covid then. I get that it’s still an inference, but it would be foolish to believe he doesn’t. Believing he does take a crap is more in alignment with logic and reality. 1. If Sadhguru eats, then he poops. 2. I’ve seen Sadhguru eat. 3. Therefore, Sadhguru poops.

There you go. That’s what I’m pointing to. Contemplation is a must. If all you are doing is quieting the mind, that is like wearing only one shoe to a marathon. Adventure, being active, and ambition are important values.

You already are in actuality. Quieting your mind does not equate with intelligence and understanding. If you want peace of mind, then quieting your mind is useful. But if you want deep understanding and make nuanced distinctions, then you need to use your mind.

I am coming from the perspective of having done meditation seriously since 2018 with the most I have ever sit was 5 hours in a day. But the issue is that you guys say meditate for an hour or so a day, and I am saying that it isn’t about how much time you spend in meditation but rather the quality of your consciousness and how deep you go now. I claim that quieting your mind only gets you so far. You need to contemplate!

We already are consciousness. You can’t just live life sitting on a cushion. You need to be active and ambitious. You have to contemplate and have a vision for the future while also appreciating the present moment. The only meditation practice I do is visualization/LoA. I would say contemplation is meditation, but the way meditation is talked about is the opposite of contemplation. Contemplation is about deeply thinking about reality whereas meditation is quieting the mind. Quieting the mind is good in moderation, but you have to use your mind.

I don’t think you guys are quite understanding what I’m trying to point to. If everything can be meditative, then why would you need to sit for 1 hour a day when you could go outside and garden or go for an hour run and have that same meditative state? That routine of meditating an hour a day becomes too much. If anything, 5-10 minutes of formal meditation is enough. Right now I’m on a serene walk through the woods. The issue is trying to define meditation as only one thing such as sitting down eyes closed and chanting. This is not meditative for everyone. I have too much curiosity and ambition to confine my mind with this practice of 5 hours a day. If you really want amazing results with meditation, you need to go at it all the way. Doing 5-10 minutes or an hour a day will only get you so far. It’s not a worthwhile investment for me to devote 5 hours a day and let only 1 hour.

He literally does in his book called meditation. He says meditation is simply being the witness to whatever you experience. He says you can meditate while driving, while running, while dancing, while hiking, while having sex, etc. What I’m arguing is that if everything can be a meditation, then why the Hell would you won’t to confine yourself to 10 years in a freaking room staring at a wall and chanting a mantra? Life is too short and there is a big world to explore. If you can meditate everywhere, then you would miss out on a lot of opportunities spending everyday in a room. Meditation seems like a prison to me that one confines themselves to. You don’t need to sit down for 1 hour with no thoughts. You might as well be dead by how some people practice with 5-10 hours of meditation a day.

Be honest though. If you won free tickets to go travel Europe or go on a 10 day Vipassana retreat in Costa Rica, I bet you’d pick the travel through Europe. If you can make everything a meditation, then there is absolutely no point in sitting in one place for 10 days. It’s a complete waste of time. I meditated for 5 hours straight and it was a waste of time. I can be more happy walking outside and running and more connected to being than doing some monotonous activity like closing my eyes and focusing on my breath and chanting a mantra.

I would agree. But you don’t have to sit with eyes closed with no thoughts to experience the truth of being. Since thoughts are part of reality, it would be a mistake to not use them to contemplate. Life is too short for me to sit all day with eyes closed. I’m a very active person and I think you can access truth by not meditating.

Good. I would agree. My issue is that people think that to meditate, you have to shut off and quiet the mind. This is not meditation but more like what cults use to indoctrinate. You have to be thinking in life if you want to be intelligent. Of course, it is good to balance that with quieting the mind. But you don’t have to sit cross legged and count your breaths to do that. I find that if I work out and go to the gym, I am more present than when I try to meditate. Counting my breaths and closing my eyes has never made me more blissful than walking in nature and contemplating the beauty of existence. If I had a choice between going to a 10 day Vipassana and 10 days in a national park. I will take the 10 days in a national park everytime. Life is too short to be sitting on your ass for 10 days. My point is why do that when you get more benefits doing something else.

I just added my definition of meditation above. Yes, but what is the purpose of distinguishing aversion and craving and not being attached to emotions? How does that add to increase your curiosity and gratitude?

Flat earthers would disagree and just say that you can sail around it in the same way that a disk spins on a track. The shape of the earth is an objective truth and not a subjective or relative truth. An objective truth just means that facts exist independent of your beliefs, culture, experience, consciousness, etc. whereas a subjective truth says that truth is a matter of personal preference. But we can clearly see that people can be wrong in their beliefs. The earth being round is objective because it is either round or it isn’t and it isn’t just a personal preference. We could even apply this to a good musician. Being a good musician isn’t just subjective. There are objective criteria that make someone a master or beginner. Of course, the lines can be blurred, but there are objective things that are pleasing to the human ear. If I say violins are pleasing to my ear but really aren’t, then I am wrong. If I say that Trump is a good philosopher and is smarter than Einstein, that would be demonstrably false. This isn’t just personal subjective preference. The nuance between subjective and objective truth is challenging and twisty.

But the 5 senses and thoughts are intertwined with awareness. There is nothing to be aware of without senses and thoughts. Also, I would say that contemplation is a higher-order faculty than pure awareness. Awareness only gets you to see things as they are. Contemplation gets you to see things as they are and how they could be. Without contemplation, without the intellect, you couldn’t have advised Bandman to not use his intellect. Do you see the paradox and strange loop there? You are using your intellect to tell us to not use our intellect.

That’s what I thought. It’s a part of consciousness like gravity, thought, and temperature are.

You assume time doesn’t exist. How exactly can change exist if time doesn’t? To be able to read this and respond back takes time. To argue that time doesn’t exist takes time for you to argue that. Notice that.

Who invented Hell? There’s your clue.

Contemplation Gym/Running Reading Nature Walks Journaling

I give her my number that way if she texts me, I know she is interested. Women preach feminism but still expect men to be the leaders all the time. These SJ warriors are perpetuating the patriarchy by holding these gender expectations.

I have been reading now into chapter 4 and the book is pretty insightful, but it is full of a lot of generalizations about women. For instance, the other makes a ridiculous claim that women aren’t interested in intelligence, mathematics, science, philosophy, etc. Maybe at the general level this is true, but there are always exceptions. Some feminists would argue that more women would be into these activities if there were more equal access. But some people state that even in the most liberal countries, women are still less involved in those activities. Also, the book is one sided and does not really discuss the pressures that women face such as the pressures for marriage, partnership, and children. Women are pressured to be wives and mothers because that is what they are taught is what makes a woman valuable. The book is still very insightful.

Mate. A walk on a nature trail is literally $0. A drive around town is literally $0. Walking into bookstores and into a library is literally $0. All I am hearing is excuses. It sounds like you don’t want a girlfriend that bad enough, which is entirely fine. If it came down to it, which one matters more to you: Business or Relationship?

I have been contemplating the nature of time, and I came to these conclusions as of now. Time is a fundamental part of reality. Time is something that all of life revolves around but itself cannot be grasped. Time presents a paradox to life in that it is central to life but yet cannot be controlled. Everything we do is bound by time, from our daily routines to long-term goals, and even your ability to read what I am writing here. To say time is an illusion seems to dismiss the direct experience being had here in that change is happening. Time, change, and memory go together. There cannot be change or memory without time because change and memory implies a before and an after. On the other hand, there is the paradox that all time is happening in the eternal now and that the past, present, and future are being imagined simultaneously. Did the past really happen? What exactly is the past but your mind reconstructing it in the present? Time is a figment of consciousness. If consciousness did not have time, there could not be any experience. What is an experience without a before and an after? The future is more an illusion than the past because technically the future is an idea of what you can create now but haven't. Possibility is the only real function of the future and our story is the purpose of the past. In a way, our past is constructed but in a way, our past did happen but maybe not in the way we think it might. For instance, I have memories of the past, but the memories of themselves are never an exact replica of the past. Even if I had a body cam throughout my life, that still wouldn't be able to capture all of that time because the past also includes all of my thoughts, stories, feelings, and beliefs I had at that particular time. The now is so infinite that it includes infinite past and future. All memory is about the past that is occurring in the present. For instance, you read this post. You couldn't comprehend what I wrote without time. I think of time like a book in that we have a beginning, middle, and end - a past, present, and future. But our particular human consciousness cannot go back and flip through to old chapters like you can in a book. The only way a human consciousness can go back into the past is by remembering it in the present, and this process of re-membering is also a constructive process. Time is still very tricky, but I have realized that it is more fundamental than I thought. Buddhists Bats will try to convince you that time is an illusion, but yet they will tell you to sit and meditate and be patient and "wait for your enlightenment." There are even different forms of time such as psychological time, biological time, sociological time, physical time, etc., so what form of time are these Buddhist Bats saying is an illusion? There is a before enlightenment and after enlightenment. Right now, I am not enlightened. Will I ever be? I don't know. Leo also has claimed to access God Consciousness. But is he conscious of that now? I don't know. But at some point, your mystical experiences fade into the past where your present is left with but a memory of your so-called enlightenment experience. But if all your left with is a memory of your God-Realization, Alien Consciousness Psychedelic trip, then how can you claim that, that is real but the past is an illusion if all of your mystical experiences are part of the past experienced in the present? If you get that last sentence, then you understand the problem. There is no such thing as an enlightened/awakened being. You cannot freeze your awakening in time. Forget about your previous awakenings. You are either directly conscious of the absolute truth right now or you aren't. And there will be parts of your life, instances in time in which you will not be awake/enlightened no matter how conscious you have become. So, my ultimate conclusion is that time exists and is fundamental to consciousness. There is nothing for consciousness to be conscious of without time, a before and an after. Time is change, time is experience. We are all slave to time. Whether we like it or not, we are all going to die. Is death a belief? No. To say death is a belief is death-denial. Your human form will die, but the essence of reality cannot. Now, it is up for us what to do with our time and really I am referring to what you are gonna do with your consciousness in your finite amount of time on the earth. Edit: Here’s a practice exercise. The next time you are taking a piss, contemplate time. Notice that there is a before and an after. After you are done, you can contemplate if you actually experienced pissing or if you just imagined it. Please let me know what your thoughts are on the nature of time. And feel free to take your time.

Don’t be so certain. We are still in the dark age.

What if Einstein’s Relativity is wrong? What if we are giving too much authority to a dead white man? You can deny time exists all you want. But it still affects you. Without time, there is no memory or thought. If time didn’t exist, then there could be no movement, no change, no existence because time is these things. You say time is an illusion, but like I said in my original post: what form of time are you arguing is an illusion? Sociological time? Biological? Physical? Psychological? Time is the flow of change and is a force of life as real as gravity. Why don’t you say gravity is also an illusion? Isn’t that a double standard? If you say gravity is an illusion, then you are denying direct experience.

Deception isn’t outside of your consciousness. You are the deception. Ego is the deception. How is that false? How did you validate the existence of something outside of your consciousness? Anything you say that is outside of consciousness is actually an idea inside your consciousness right now. Please notice this.