Shmurda

Thanks for the clarity guys. Much love xx

I see a lot of talk in the spiritual domain about how, when we go to the root causes of our activity, love and fear are the only two forces in life. I also see a lot of teachers warning against those who frame reality in dualities, and that a trinity is necessary to capture the relative nature of our finite human existence. This seems like a contradiction. If there is only fear and love, that is a duality. What am I missing?

When you become more conscious, you are able to witness the activity of the self with more clarity. This also extends into the sleep process. When we are going to sleep, at some point our attention dissolves, removing the feeling of the subjective perspective. This is the point at which we are no longer going to sleep and we cease to identify as a body, mind or ego. But as we become more effective meditators, we become more acutely aware of this shift from being the one going to sleep to ceasing to be aware of anything. This means at some point we must stop being consciousness that is aware of going to sleep and simply become consciousness itself. Recently I have realised that, for my whole life, I have relied on lying down and becoming distracted by the contents of the mind and simply drifting into sleep. However, recently my mind has become so sharp that I am constantly aware of my conscious experience. Thus I can no longer get to sleep by relying on distraction. So my question is, if you are constantly aware that you are conscious, how do you consciously enter the sleep state? Or, another way of phrasing it, how do you meditate to sleep?

@tsuki thanks for the response. I guess what I'm asking is, how do we get from Stuff + conditional identification (waking) To Stuff + unconditional identification (dream) If meditation is the inactivity of the self, then by my understanding, the way to trigger a dream state would be to disidentify from self in waking life and to become self as imagination. So I guess my question is, how can you do this when you are aware that you are in the waking state? Is there a way to focus your attention to enter dream state or must you always rely on eventually getting distracted from waking reality and falling into dream state?

Some more of the typical reductionist statements that never allow philosophical and practical discussion on this forum to get off the ground. Yes, I know this, that's why I'm here but I'm also not presently aware that I'm pure consciousness, hence why there is anything to discuss at all.

@tsuki Interesting. So you're saying you think meditation is the inactivity of the self. So if one is comfortable and in a deep state of meditation, this the same as being asleep? I thought that meditation also included a self-aware witness of experience. For example, I can bring myself out of meditation whenever I want, by virtue of knowing I am meditating. I don't know when I'm in deep sleep. Perhaps you could answer the first iteration of the question, in your experience?

I think you're experiencing this because you're pondering the absolute and endowing it with objects like problems and solutions. Whether the set of problems is greater than the set of solutions or vice versa, this set must exist in a universal set which contains them both. This is what is meant by non-duality. This also what is meant by the absolute self or God. Now, if there's only one universal entity then everything that happens is the activity of that one entity. It doesn't go anywhere or encounter anything other than itself so it plays with itself (lol). This is what is meant by Love. You can become directly aware of these concepts through transcendent experiences and realise that they are also the same thing.

It sounds like you're looking for a transcendent experience e.g "I have had few insights but..." "...and want to believe that..." This kind of thinking is only going to distract you more. Because of what you're doing, your mind must be begging for distraction. If I were you, I would not be using the internet as this gives the mind plenty of distraction to feed on. The emotional resistance you feel is the progress you're looking for. The mind says "Is this a waste of time?" witness that, don't give up. "I can only sit for 6 hours!" witness, don't give up. "My neck/back/body hurts." witness, don't give up. It doesn't feel nice or enlightening does it? But what you're witnessing is the insatiable ramblings of the ego-mind, desperately searching for a way to remove itself from the light of your attention. When you keep witnessing and keep making your experiences the objects of your attention, you'll eventually notice that all of your mind is objects and objects don't exist! What's left is the I. It cannot be found or seen or known. It's simply the only thing that remains once you've seen through the illusion of yourself. My advice: turn off your internet, try to stop thinking about enlightenment and when your mind says "okay 6 hours we're done..." then sit for seven. Watch the mental gymnastics unfold.

Hello mate, Yes, I have had the same on/off experience for years. I used to think it was related to my use of psychedelics - a few days, weeks or months after I dosed, I would feel great and like the world made sense. Then, before I knew it I was back to earth and stuck as myself and I didn't understand why. In many ways, it is related to psychs, because psychs give you that key insight. But what I missed at the time was the depth of the insight. It wasn't til I started to sit for way longer - practicing the "neti, neti" method and doing nothing for at least an hour a day - that I gained the confidence to stand as awareness all the time. At the time of writing I haven't slept for 48 hours, despite the fact that I tried. A few years ago I would panic and mope around desperately looking for somewhere to rest my head. But I'm not, because I know now beyond all doubt what the truth is. I feel it my heart and my bones. TLDR; Find a practice that gives you that key insight and drill the fuck out of it.

@Peter124 Yes, God is cruel to you Peter. But it is not God who holds the double standard, it is you, or rather, the person you think you are. You've realised you are part of God, through spiritual awakening. Now, instead of destructing the cruel world that you find yourself in, it is your self-concept that must destruct. After that, there is only God. This is the end of suffering.

I feel for you mate. I started doing a lot of research about climate change and it made me realise how dire our environmental crisis is. When it really hit me that my body-mind may die from this, along with those of every person who I know and love, I felt great anxiety and resistance. The claustrophobic fear and feeling of being seperate hung in my awareness creating a sense of dread. I started to see death everywhere. I meditated on it and kept telling myself "accept it, its okay, c'est la vie..." and all this, trying to reconcile my ego with its own imminent end to no avail. I would be browsing the internet and see an article about arctic ice melting and feel a chill run down my spine. So, I decided to take a strong dose of mushrooms and really delve into this feeling. As the trip came on I felt that familiar feeling arise. I also felt myself reeling at the prospect. So I said to myself "This is it. This mushroom trip is last thing you will ever do. You aren't gonna die in 5 or 10 years, your death is now." Then, I let myself die and all the pain and fear came pouring out and what was left was peace. What I'm trying to say is, there was no way for me to work around this fear, sit with or take it easy and wait for it to pass. It had always been there, lurking in my shadow and I brought it up to the surface. Then it only had two places to go, back down into the shadow or exorcised from the self by letting the self-concept die. This is what a stronger dose psychedelic can do for you if you're prepared to surrender everything. Let the crippling fear of death collapse onto the self-concept and crush it under the weight of certainty, thereby killing the self. Once your self has died, there's nothing left to fear.

Hey, I'm a Maths teacher for secondary students in an International school in a developing nation. This country is not one in which I risk being jailed for religious heresy. The students are intelligent fluent English speakers with wealthy families. I'm basically free to teach however I please, so long as I cover specific mathematical content over the course of the school year. After listening to Leo's video on applications of Spiral Dynamics, I'm interested in attempting to implement some techniques in the classroom which reflect Spiral Dynamics stage yellow and systems thinking in general. This has to happen at the classroom level only, as I cannot alter the educational structure of the whole school. So, have you had any ideas about revolutionising the classroom environment? Lets give them a go!

Hello all, Question is in the title. Clearly, if we are to exist in a non-corrupt system that benefits society at large, we ought to pay tax. However, misappropriation of public funds is a massive issue to the extent that we really can't trust some governments to invest in the interests of the system as a whole. Should we continue to support these governments by paying tax? One response is "we must pay tax to them despite their corruption because without any tax funds, the society cannot exist." True. But, if lower vibrational, egoic energy tends to flow towards centralised power structures (If this is up for debate then I'm eager to hear what you think), then surely by supporting them, we are reinforcing this corrupt behaviour and, as such, providing resources for the manifestation of further corruption.