Seeker531

There are many things one can do about it. I've made it a habit to recall every evening 3 things I'm grateful for, 3 things I have compassion for and 3 things I share my joy with.

Maybe God is so wise and gives himself clues to find a way out of the illusion if it has had enough of the drama and can finally remember. Don't forget that it is also the way out of suffering and without many of the principles one won't be able to live a deeply fulfilling life because god living in falsehood feels odd to god.

@Zega maybe you should talk with @Nahm about this issue. As I heard he is experienced with these matters and he might give you some guidance.

Got a job in a lab which was sold as an opportunity to do stuff I really like if i'm willing to lend a helping hand now and then in some other section working my ass off. I ended up working only in the other departments without proper initial training and additionally without proper safety gear and that was extremely dangerous cancerous stuff. In the adverd and interview the job sounded so nice and the few parts of the small company I saw looked good as well. I learned that there is a difference between words and the real thing and that I have to think more critical and less needy and to resist firmly exploytation. Just say "no" more often. Also, since then I've got an eye for safety issues.

Once when I was about 20 and very shy and a "nice person". I was a trainee and had little money, I was tricked in signing up for an well known NGO by a hot girl in the city centre. At first our conversation started a little bit flirtingly and she flattered me a lot and we seemed to have some things in common. It was very pleasent and I got some facts. After 5 minutes she started implicitly making me feel guilty for not taking the responsibility for the poor children around the world and she emphasized how they were suffering and all kinds of hardship. At the same time she blamed all the people who help. I told her I had little money and can't really afford it but she pressed me for 10 more minutes making me feel guilty and doing some calculations could do this and somehow I couldn't go although I sought a way out of the conversation. finally I signed that shit. I left feeling a bit abused. It took a long time and more pain to understand how such things work and that she pushed some bottons.

Once I bought a used microwave on the ebay version of craig's list and when I arrived at the adress I noticed that the neighborhood was more of a suspicious one and got a bad feeling. However I told myself that this might be just some bias and proceeded. I did not get the last name but was told that when I messaged her she would open the door and so she did. When I was inside an old (around 60) very pleasent woman opened the door smiling and let me try some cookies she just baked with this microwave and I admit they were delicious. She told me she baked them for the holidays and sells them and that she gets a new kitchen from her daughter and that's why she wants to get rid of some of the older stuff. I checked the mikrowave while eating and getting chattered to and then we tested that thing with a glas of water. But after 10 seconds she told me that this is the evidence that it worked and so it seemed. I took a quick look at the covering and the inside and gave her the money. On my way home I felt that something was odd about the niceness of that lady and when I got home I tested it with sone food again but I was suspicious and stayed there to watch again and after a minute that thing got so hot that the glass plate inside bursted and the metall covering expanded. When I took a closer look at the skews I saw that they were slighly manipulated and when I opened the covering I found out that the moter wasn't the original and ill attached. I was quiet shocked when I realized I could've burned down the entire house because I needed a new microwave quickly with a low budget. I complained and the person answered it must have broken on my way home because her 10 sec test with the water showed that it worked. Then she didn't reply. I assume that she is part of a family that looks for broken electronics on the trash and repairs and sells it because the webprofile has a lot of such stuff. So don't buy used electronics from people you don't know and don't let yourself be distracted by stories, kind words and food.

As I see it is that sometimes when you learn to let go and get out of your way healing can happen, but its not guaranteed. I've met two very rare people where that had happened but they had to go through hell to let that go during a 30 day retreat. that, however, is very rare and for the most people that won't be an option and won't work. I've also met a very experienced vipassana teacher who got cancer and he had 30 years of practice and a meditation center tried it that way and almost got killed because the cancer spread until it was almost to late. I guess it's important to learn to be at peace with it and look for a material solution if possible.

@BadHippie Yeah, I know her points and I've already mentioned yet not in detail that there are ways to make the test reliable and it worked quiet well for other viruses. But I see the page she referred to denies the concept or rather the existence of viruses. I've checked it out and must say there is so much misinformation, bullshit and fear mongering that its almost crazy. Back to the subject...even though you can't separate it completely from its context or enviroment and you can't just get one pure thing out but the procedure proofed to be reliable. You can purify the solution without any organism in it then add a bacteria solution and then your sample, then purify and repeat until one strain of virus is left and then enrich it. the dna of the bacteria is known and then you've got other pieces which don't come from nowhere. I am a lab technician and I have worked in the field of biotechnology but hey what do I know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huEaH-boaoY And btw posting of this misinformation as in the link isn't allowed.

@BadHippie most of the questions you've had on the last page need a very nuanced and complicated explanation and it is too much to explain in a text format out of the fly. However I'll try to at least elaborate some of them. First of all, It's true that mostly elderly and sick people have the worst symptoms but even people who live healthy have gotten covid and heavy symptoms and there are quiet a lot if you know that about 40 percent of the population are 60+ und even under the younger people there are a unignorable amount of people with preconditions and some of them are really at risk. Then the thing with the PCR test is that it gives you (when correctly sampled) a quiet reliable way to give you value on how high your viral load is and that is a critical factor for the amount of virus you exhale through your raspitory system. Additionally, there is among other things the ct value to ensure that there are as little false positives due to random dna pieces as possible. I've noticed it's more common among people who take a more critical stance towards vaccination to feel symptoms after the shot. There could be a bias. Yeah and in some way of course you're right the government has an agenda and is biased towards the danger and will interpret put many critical perspective unnuanced in the same basket even though some points are valid, but overall it does a good job and it adaptes quiet good to the new data and the immediate changes of the flow. But please consider that many people who put forward arguments against covid measures and the actual threat are eventually with the recent data debunked like eg the number of positive tested person would increase the same amount as the test capacity or that lock downs with the measures don't reduce the incidence. This is a lack in understanding statistics and epistimology. Often these experts are also unable to see the bigger picture and if falsified they handwave that away and find another reason. Now, let's cast some light on why there is so much corona fear mongering in the media. First of all, the media always fear monger. Secondly, if they didn't, everybody would give a shit about the measures because it isn't enforced and people would just forget it and that would make the corona cases explode. Moreover, if you asked why the goverment makes false promises can have many reasons. One reson is that they as we all come from ignorance and what we know changes over time and we are only able to predict in the very short term, but to not create panic they make us and themselves believe they know more. That does everybody of us and it prevents chaos and instability and fear. You've surely noticed that at beginn of the pandemic people got afraid and bought the shit out of some essentially necessary product. What do you assume would happen if there were a real outbreak of chaos? Another reason is that in this crisis the government will give people hope that the measurements will end quickly because it's psychologically better to keep it positive and always talk about negative things in short term. Another thing is that many of the bad prophecies from the ct's stemmes from the selfishness of people in general, like the states's goverments in Germany did their own selfish thing to look good which caused damage and forced the central government to step in as it is in the United States the case. The is the case with people who don't keep up the measures and anti vaccers. That increases the new covid cases and the portion of the vaccinated population is too low to be effective and reduce measures. And it would be great if you could see the greater circle of concern. For example, at the time when so many people were hospitalized the hospitals hadn't enough capacities for nessary operations and that caused some colleteral damage as well. Also, there might be a benefit when you grow your consciousness to become more world centric and that outnumbers easily the amount of consciousness you would lose though vaccination (this vaccine has far less toxins than the older ones) and if you happen to be a smoker then there is already 100x more toxine and you don't need to worry about it. I would also propose for you to stop feeding that narrative but rather start learning a bit of science and statistics and psychology so that you can start making good sense of things. And maybe one more point. deconstructing science is good work for your spiritual growth but it doesn't make scientific knowledge completely invalid. At last it is a useful tool and the deconstruction aims to seeing that, INCLUDING it and going beyond and be a scientist during the process as the buddha was. Finally, I didn't go into the damage of the action to prevent the virus from spreading. The cost is huge but the society looks for survival in the short run and actual lives are at stake so the this damage come secondly as long as it is beareble for the whole. this shouldn't be seen as arrogance but as an attempt to clear misunderstandings and it's still up to you if you take the vaccine or leave it. At the first 6 months of the pandemic I considered corona totally blown up but I stayed open and with the new data I've changed my mind.

The light might be a nimitta. Just do nothing with it and it might become clearer.

Yeah, that with the police is quite common but the most racism happens on a very subtle level. Another, more common example for this is my sister. I've never trouble with racism because I'm blonde and have blue eyes. My sister is a bit darker and has the same lastname from southeast europe as me. From early back in school (she was in a better one with little imigrants) she always had to be very ambitious to compensate for teacher's giving her lesser grades for equally work. so she works much harder and that is a thread through her and her fiance's lives. Nowadays she is in the middle-upper middle class(stage orange) and often when she tells somebody that her fiance is working night shifts she gets remarks like "oh, working class" or "he must work for mc donalds" or when they first hear his parents are from turkey they make small racist remarks and hint that he must be uneducated since his turkish roots. She also has had troubles going to more expensive restaurants or looking for an apartment because when she mentions her or his lastname the people quickly get suspicious. The people only seem to be at ease when she tells them their profession (teacher and neuro-surgeon) and then people wonder why they are so hung up when they brag about their jobs. I think I have to tell this because even here some people seem so disconnected in their privileged bubbles that the depth of the problem doesn't crosses their mind. @DocWatts very well explained.

The thing that it isn't often visible from from a non minority perspective how much rasism there is. Just ask a few black persons how often they're controlled by the police or get a stupid racist remark out of the nowhere. Even if it doesn't happen on a every day basis it's still enough to call it racism. Even in central europe where I'm from there is plenty of it. But it also depends on the location and social structure. They may have equal rights on papers but the poor treatment and structural barriers remain and becoming slowly less with each new born generation

That's a nice one? It's not about awakening per se but maybe rather the present moment if you know what I mean.

@evolving55555 That isn't that easy. It also depends hugely about how well you get on with a technique. After you've done your retreat you can try this one for comparison: This monk is also from Canada and has his retreat center there. I was in europe with this technique on a 15 day retreat once and the technique kept getting complexer and complexer each day until day 10 and then down from 6hrs to 4 hours of sleep. That was very effective to face all the suffering and let go. But that's just my experience and I only have hearsay from people who tried Goenka and came disappointed to the other technique but that doesn't mean the technic is invalid or so, it may have various reasons like eg it just didn't fit with the person and I am a bit biased too.

I often suffer from a tension created headache. I've learnt that one can learn to make peace with it each time as a practice and it won't disturb you anymore for some time. Another way is to see that I created this cobstant feeling, which isn't constant in reality, it is more like seeing, thinking, feeling. That on which you keep the focus you stabilize as one continuous object, but it turned out that this stabilizing caused the pain which grows less and less when you turn your focus away. Yet another way is to actively feel ibto the pain and don't turn away or try to change anything, become one with it that helped me dealing with immense pain when I was in hospital a while ago. Well, I guess you can learn a lot from it. ?