Osaid

Might need a study partner for that one, and now you know why there is so little scientific research on sex.

That's fair, I kinda skimmed through it. I don't like the terminology of "letting go" and "dropping" because I feel that is interpreted as "stop imagining thoughts", which is, again, avoidance. It creates this idea that thoughts are inherently creating issues, when the only issue is the way you are using those thoughts to point to yourself. It is not a matter of how good you are at handling emotions or building some kind of cumulative strength against emotional thoughts, the error actually has absolutely nothing to do with emotions, it has to do with the thing you are having an emotional reaction to, which is a misconception of yourself. Your emotions are perfectly in tune with what you believe you are perceiving, which is an imagined version of yourself. The way he described "letting go" of his attachment to his kids really reminded me of this sort of "emotional bodybuilding" sentiment I see a lot, which is this idea that you have to sacrifice all your desires and go through emotional hardship to become enlightened or something, which I find misleading. Not wrong depending on how you look at it, just misleading in my opinion. I guess the main contention really comes down to "letting thoughts go in order to find the root" and how you wish to accomplish that, and I simply find his verbiage in this section inefficient and misleading for accomplishing that, but that might just be me and how I like to communicate things.

Don't know if he achieved enlightenment or not, but I don't jive with his description at all, especially when he is asked about good thoughts and bad thoughts. He talks about "learning to parse through bad thoughts" and that a certain region of the brain is much more "sweeter" and "useful", which would be the region which does not deal with thoughts. But this is still pretty much an avoidance of thoughts rather than a realization of how thoughts work. "It" is not something you learn or get better at. Enlightenment is like a crystal clear realization that you cannot think of yourself at all, to the point where you are not afflicted by thoughts about yourself at all. There is no point in avoiding thoughts because there is nothing to avoid. I definitely agree though that there is probably a measurable change in the brain and it certainly feels that way, and the idea that it has something to do with the default node network is probably accurate. He also describes it as "letting go of all your attachments one by one", and I think this is a common misconception which seriously misleads people. This would be similar to belief-changing or therapy, but enlightenment is not a changing of beliefs or therapy, it is an uprooting which completely and permanently disables the necessity for beliefs altogether. You don't need to examine every single attachment and the context that comes with those attachments, that is something you could do forever because you can generate attachments forever. All those attachments naturally dissipate when you realize that you truly cannot think of yourself. As an analogy, attachments and beliefs are like branches on a tree, and then self-image/ego is the root of the tree. What needs to be questioned is the root, which is "What am I?", not the branches that stem from the existence of that self-image, like "I should really stop being attached to this thing because it is bad for me."

Haha, I think Leo did pretty good at interpreting the experiences at the beginning, but something did go awry at some point I guess.

As was I. Unfortunately for psychedelic enthusiasts, it has to happen sober. You can knock yourself out with psychedelic experiences once you reach enlightenment, but otherwise the potential for delusion is massive. This is common sense when you realize that no recorded enlightened person became enlightened through psychedelics, and also that no enlightened person throughout history even really mentions them as a favourable route. But, if that seems like an appeal to authority, it is also simply the case that you have to live your life as a sober human, unless you are seeking to permanently be on a psychedelic or something. The actual problem is not that line of reasoning I just provided, but that psychedelic users actually believe that enlightenment is a certain experience or state of consciousness out of many, which completely prevents them from even entertaining the idea of doing it sober. They believe they are reaching enlightenment and then coming back down from it through the psychedelics, so the psychedelics become a massive red herring which they perpetually pursue. They either don't know what enlightenment is, or they don't even believe it exists anymore because of their previously acclimated psychedelic dogma. Because of this, they often find themselves chasing their own tail through psychedelic experiences forever, in the same way a scientist attempts to figure out reality by pursuing science forever. Another big problem is that people who are going into psychedelics for enlightenment have no clue what enlightenment is, they just have an idea of it. They come out of a psychedelic experience thinking they've experienced or debunked enlightenment, but all they've done is experienced and debunked their own idea of enlightenment, not enlightenment itself. Or, another thing that happens is that they make up an idea of enlightenment, and simply just chase that forever through psychedelics. Once the psychedelic wears off, you are not directly conscious of what you were experiencing on the psychedelic anymore, and so it is turned to memory and metabolized by the ego. You have not transcended your biochemical structure as a human (despite what the DMT entity may have told you), and so the chemicals which prevented the ego from functioning properly are eventually out of the body and so you cannot use it as a clutch anymore. I think it also needs to be said that meditation and psychedelics are two completely different things. They do not serve the same purpose, at all. It is like comparing apples to oranges. I saw a thread recently of a guy asking if he should take psychedelics while meditating, because meditation was too boring for him or something. Like, dude, that completely misses the point of meditation, you're not gonna be able to meditate while you've been transmogrified into a chair. I see many psychedelic users asking whether psychedelics are better than meditation, which is quite silly. They rag on meditation because it didn't transform them into a cartoon wolf after they focused on their breath. The purpose of meditation is not cartoon wolf consciousness, it is enlightenment. The same goes for other sober methods like self-inquiry and yoga or whatever. You can't linearly compare psychedelics to meditation like that, and this contention obviously only exists, because, again, psychedelic users misinterpret what enlightenment is, and so they try to put meditation and other sober methods in the framework of psychedelic experiences. I said unfortunate at the beginning, but it is really fortunate in retrospect. No need to deal with psychedelic delusions, and it is much simpler than chasing exotic states of consciousness and then creating elaborate concepts and conclusions out of it.

Yes, it is very deceptive in that way. The experiences it creates are insanely powerful. If human beings can imagine religions from the baseline state, imagine what they can imagine from psychedelic experiences.

I noticed that psychedelics have a habit of anthropomorphizing what is realized from enlightenment. It is like dreaming while awake, or experiencing a metaphor in real life. You can have experiences that feel infinite, loving, godly, etc, but they are not the same as what is found in enlightenment, and they are often perpetuated through identities and stories. Psychedelics create very powerful emotional states, which the ego has to create beliefs and explanations around, simply because that is how the ego operates. For example, the ego cannot believe that it is a worthless piece of crap while experiencing a strong feeling of love, it has to believe something else. It has to create another belief in that moment, like "I am everything therefore I must love everything", or "There is no difference between anything therefore I must love myself." As another example, from the sober state you can realize yourself to be infinite, but you can also have an experience on psychedelics where you are living an infinite amount of lifetimes, to which you then proclaim: "Oh my god, reality is infinite and it goes on forever." And this seems to be the same "infinite" spoken by enlightened folks, but it is not. Or, you can have an experience on psychedelics where you realize that you are just imagining all the things that you hate about yourself, and this creates an intellectual insight which says "Everything I hate is imaginary therefore it is wrong and selfish to hate things." These experiences creates many conflations like this, which seem to be the same as enlightenment, but really aren't the same at all.

All glimpses are simply just glimpses, not the actual thing. Don't hold on to them so much. They are distorted. When you have a glimpse of something, it is absolutely not the full picture, and you should let go of it. You can't truly have glimpses of such things because all glimpses are distorted and partial in some way, so they should not be given so much significance. They are speculation at best. Ego backlash is really not a result of anything. It's made out of nothing, or in other words, "glimpses." If you achieved Truth, you stay there forever. If you aren't there, then your ego is making some shit up. You can't make further progress after realizing something, because you already realized it. It is possible to progressively memorize math equations forever, but it is not possible to realize what you are and then think "but maybe there is more of me to realize, maybe what I realized is inaccurate." That means you never actually understood what you are. Your ego backlash is not a result of any experience or any kind of truth, but the ego's perception of that. Also, when you say parts of experience "become mine", that does not sound non-dual to me, it sounds like identity-shifting. Same goes for "I am imagining everything." Please be careful not to adopt pseudo-spiritual identities. All ideas and answers are truly useless in this work, all they can do is help guide you towards the work, but they wont do it for you.

If we wanna talk about Sadghuru specifically, what personally stood out to me was his emotional intelligence, which is kind of what you're alluding to as well I guess. After the scientist said his monologue at the beginning, the very first thing that Sadghuru did was not a response to defend his position, but rather, he directed himself to the audience and said "namaskaram" and hoped they were doing well. Subtle things like that stood out to me from him, and then of course what you highlighted would also be part of that emotional intelligence to a degree.

Sadghuru casually obliterating solipsism brain rot: "there is no 'my consciousness', there is your being and my being" Closest we'll get to his take, I guess.

Jake Chudnow really just has his own flavour IMO, his songs produce emotions I've never felt before. Highly recommend going through the rest of his stuff, they are as good if not better.

The materialist guy isn't necessarily wrong, all he really did was state his position, which was on point scientifically speaking. However, he does not address what Sadghuru is saying at all. It really felt like there was zero exchange between the two. He initially says that clairvoyance does not exist, Sadghuru corrects him to say that they are not necessarily talking about clairvoyance or such things, but then he continues to harp on the point of magical abilities, as if Sadghuru is claiming he can start flying through meditation or something. Once you start talking about consciousness and its potential perceptual capabilities which go beyond what is normally perceived, this guy just lumps it in with ESP and magical abilities. Overall, it seems the materialist came in with a very fixed mindset about meditation, and didn't really consider a more nuanced position at all. He probably believes that most of what Sadghuru is saying is just quackery and magical abilities unsupported by science, and so he felt a need to really stress that such things should not be relied on. He basically sees Sadghuru as a psychic peddling people off the street. All things considered, this is probably about as fruitful such a conversation would get anyways.

Of course, I did not mean to deny this. No, preferring things has nothing to do with self-image. It is not selfish to prefer vanilla over chocolate, for example. Or drinking water when you are thirsty. Those are just biological imperatives which do not require a self at all. The perception of thirst is not selfishness, and the perception of a pleasant flavour is not selfishness, the perception of those two things as being selfish is itself selfishness. It is a common misconception to perceive desires and preferences as something which involve a self, but that self only appears when you create beliefs about yourself in relation to those desires and preferences. For example, it is not selfish to want to reach first place in a race. It is selfish to say "I desire to win this race, because otherwise I will be unworthy." In the latter case, the only reason the race is desired is because it is genuinely believed it will solve a lack of self-worth. What is desired is not actually the race, but the absolution of the belief that you are unworthy. When you win the race, that is the moment that you start to change your self-image, because now your experience contradicts your previous identity, which was the identity of someone who has never won a race before and therefore is not worthy. Your emotions are perfectly in tune with what you think you are perceiving, which is an imagined self. If you live in a world that is threatened by imagination, then it is perfectly normal to seek a state of non-imagination, just as normal as it would be to run away from a bear. It is not wrong or morally inferior to live in the imaginary world, but what is being pointed to is that the imaginary self can be permanently uprooted, and it can simply be realized that it didn't exist in the first place. What is called "selfishness" are the actions you take to "defend" that imagined self from thoughts and beliefs. Ah ok, but it seems related, because at the end of the day, these thought-based emotional problems are to do with that "me" entity which lingers around. Perhaps if that is absolved you will stay there longer. That is fair, you can enjoy that silence if you want, but I see that you are creating thoughts about yourself from the experience. Experience silence if you want, but no point in thinking about how your current experience isn't that silence. You are building ideas around it, for example, "normal egoic consciousness." I am saying that believing in that label is ironically a belief system created from that very blissful experience of silence. You created a dichotomy which says: "This experience is bliss, this experience is normal egoic consciousness, and neither can ever converge." For sure, there are certainly very blissful states which are worth pursuing. But I saw ideas about ego being mixed up in there, which I saw as a conflation.

That would explain his talking bubble friend, I guess. Now that you point it out, it does look like a smiling toad.

I don't know if bubbles are conscious, they usually pop when I poke them though. Have you tried poking this bubble which is encasing your experience, maybe with a needle or something? Sounds like an unfortunate situation, my condolences.

The idea that you are in "normal egoic consciousness" is false and just perpetuates that very idea, and it is actually just an identity you have created for yourself. The idea that some state is to be changed, that this is non-dual and dual, etc. just perpetuates all those ideas. Drop ideas, everything you know about spirituality, everything. And just examine what you are. The truth is you don't know what you are. And calling yourself an "ego", or "dualistic", or "limited", does not get you closer to knowing, and you actually don't know if you are any of those things at all. And to think that you are any of those things, is just more thinking, and it is mistaking the map for the territory. I think you are playing tug of war by inducing certain mysterious states through energetic practices, and this frustrates you. It is like microdosing, and then getting frustrated when it wears off and then asking "why can't that be maintained permanently?" Firstly, it should be considered that maybe that state, even though it feels good and mysterious and blissful, is not "it." Secondly, it should be considered a very real possibility, that the baseline state is being judged very harshly, and that your actual true self can easily be realized from the baseline just by carefully watching it and examining what you call "me."

Caring was never about having reasons, or things mattering, though. It was always for its own sake. Why do you need a reason to care? Isn't that what it means to care, that it happens for its own sake? Otherwise you are being blackmailed by something, isn't it? Do you need a higher reason to speak nicely to the cashier? Do you need someone to hold you at gunpoint to care for an injured kitten on the road? Maybe it is the fact that nothing matters which pushes you to care for those who are plunged into the same world as you, where nothing matters. Maybe that itself can become the reason for caring. Is there a reason why vanilla ice cream is preferred over chocolate? Does there have to be a reason? Do you have to build a moral structure out of it? For me it is like looking at food and saying, there is only salty and sweet. Songs can create very unique emotions. Some emotions only exist in relation to certain songs, for me. Some emotions feel bittersweet, like nostalgia. Absolutely nothing wrong with saying it is dark or light though, those elements definitely exist and they are felt. But much more can be felt too, is what I am emphasizing. Some darkness can be beautiful. Some darkness can be pretty. Some darkness can have hope mixed in. Some darkness can have mystery mixed in. Many flavours. Very raunchy and deep, I can get into it. This is one of those songs where you have to focus on emotions not melody.

You're the one yinning and yanning, calling music dark and light. I am just speaking in your vernacular. Although admittedly, some music can feel very shallow like that, like it has one or two emotions. For me, music is bright, dim, dark, colorful and beyond. Good luck deciding whether this one is dark or light. You don't even have lyrics to go off of this time.

Haha, I only sent it because it was similar to what you sent. I forgot it even existed before your song reminded me of it, but it's the best of that genre IMO. From my perspective, looking at the lyrics, it seems to be an equal amount of "light and dark." I usually don't listen to that type of lyrical dnb music, but this is one of the few where I think it works really well.

Good for its genre. Reminds me of this:

lmao Is this how you react everytime someone has generic taste in music? Although yes, they are not to be trusted.

There are no boxes or dolls, but I can confirm that an absence of qualia is something that exists and is perceivable. There are states which have no qualia at all, if you can imagine. Actually, the fact that you can't see behind you right now is itself a perception which depends on the fact that you can see in front of you, but this is hard to notice if you haven't entered some state of "no sensory perception." But also, ultimately, it's not really important to notice. It's just a way of mentally recontextualizing experience, and it doesn't have much to do with realizing what you are. What I am trying to say is something like, seeing in front of you is as existential as not seeing behind you, they are both yin and yang, same sides of the coin so to speak. Your mind just has a bias to focus on the appearance of qualia rather than the non-appearance of qualia, because the former can be contextualized by the finite mind, whereas the latter is a paradox for the finite mind. Kind of how light doesn't exist without dark. The only reason you can see in front of you is because you can't see behind you. But anyways, what I'm saying up till here is really just conceptual, there is no duality between seeing and not seeing ultimately, or absence and non-absence of qualia. This is just a cool metaphysical recontextualization I got from experiencing a certain state of consciousness, and I wanted to share it because your trip reminded me of it. As for your actual inquiry, it is mostly corrupt. Your questions are assuming many different contexts, such as "borders" and "outside", the very thing you sought to question. I see a big fallacy on the forum where people just assume their questions make any sense, they think questions are innocent and that reality has to give some conclusive answer to it. And then they construct entire identities around the answer that they get to these questions. They further cement the identity by pointing to some experience they had on psychedelics which supposedly confirmed it, big trap. Overall, there are assumed concepts baked into the questions themselves. You are coming up with questions, but the questions themselves are being made up by you, they don't actually point to anything, but you assume they do. You assume that borders, contexts, and "outside" are existential, but they are just questions you made up. And any answer you get will be relative to a question, which is made up. And so of course, you got answers, but they are conceptual, because answers are always relative to questions, and questions are always conceptual. There's your catch-22. It's all made up. The entire thing is a context you made up. The realization that there is no context, happens from a place of assumed context. The fact that borders exist, is not a given. The fact that context exists, is not a given. The fact that inside and outside exist, is not a given. So when you look at "Being" and ask "Hey dude, where is your context and your border? I need answers!", don't be surprised if "Being" gives you a confused look. You are putting too much credit on your ability to imagine context and borders. It is not existential, it is just the human capacity for imagination. What is more fundamental is not questioning context or borders, but questioning how those things are perceived in the first place. Don't get lost in the content, look at the structure. These things can seem existential and metaphysical, but they are really just what a human believes to be those things. The human imaginative capacity can imagine many fantastical things, contexts, borders, outside, inside, but they are irrelevant to existential experience. The question itself is the error, not the answer or inability to find an answer.

Sounds like a bad trip.

I, as God, deliberately created an omelette to feed myself. And then I, as God, deliberately created a post on this forum. And then I, as God, deliberately tricked myself into tripping over a rock today, which I imagined into existence, as God.