Tim R

Yup. The old are attached to memory, to what they know. Whatever we don't know, we fear and thus try to avoid. The young don't yet have a whole lot of memory, but a life full of potential, so they want to create something new. And then that's their world, just as the old once had a world that was new to them. It's a constant flow of the new replacing the old. That's why conservatism is, in the final analysis, a losing game. You don't even have to fight it.

Please don't post your addresses.

@Rilles Part of the illusion of being behind the eyes / being "the one who looks" and "who's being looked at" is created by confusing the visual focus point, i.e. the point where your vision is sharpest (in the center of your visual field) with "you". Because it sets up the illusion of a center, you see? We don't think of ourselves as being the fuzzy part of the visual field, the periphery. If you like, you can implement this into your meditation and inquiry: try to relax your visual focus point. In other words, you don't have to try to see. You don't have to do anything at all! Just notice, perfectly relaxed and at ease, that the visual focus point is not the center of "you". And that in fact, there is no center at all. If done correctly (so to speak), you will feel as if you're expanding into the periphery of your field of awareness. And ultimately, you as the illusory center of awareness, will vanish entirely This is of course not limited to only the visual, but to all of our senses, but we tend to identity with our vision because it creates the strongest feeling of centrality to awareness.

@Rilles What do you think you will find? What do you expect? Say for example in regard to the question you posed, what do you suppose will be different for you once you find out that you don't exist?

"They" stare neither "at you" nor "through you". There's just me, "looking at myself". Nobody looking at nobody. Like a mirror that is its own reflection. I know this sounds like what you've heard it a thousand times before, but what can I say. You asked? Haha that's just asking "how to get rid of myself?"?? @Rilles Man, you're not behind your friggin' eyes, get that!!!

Mental masturbation is what you get when you don't understand that concepts can't grasp reality but you still try to do exactly that. Genuine inquiry is a sparing use of concepts, knowing that they are useful only to a very, very limited extent and therefore you don't overdo it.

Very good? there's a Russian saying "за двумя зайцами погонишься, ни одного не поймаешь", which translates to "if you chase after two rabbits, you won't catch either one". Your capacity to focus/concentrate is limited. so you need to decide what to invest your capacities in. You don't necessarily have to focus on just one thing and neglect everything else, but you do need to distribute your focus depending on what you think is more important. You can focus on university / spirituality, nobody said you have to do 50/50 for both and then only get 50/50 results, you can do 90/10 and get 90/10 results. When I first got into university, I focused more on spirituality and big picture understanding of reality - though not consciously, it was spiritual bypassing. Which eventually caught up with me at the end of my studies (I still managed to get a somewhat decent degree in science, but it could have been better). These days I'm trying to make up for what I spiritually bypassed in my late youth, I don't regret beginning with spirituality early on, but I do think that it would probably have been better the other way round, first survival, then spirituality.

Please don't make duplicate posts.

It's just a metaphor... You're getting hung up on imagery.

@Leo Gura Could you maybe make a blog post about this ? How you practice it? That'd be quite interesting.

@Javfly33 Oh just wait until I write a guided exercise for you guys to see through the illusion of time hopefully that will trigger a deep awareness of Now. Because there's a whole bunch of illusions attached to that which we can get rid of all at once.

Most of the story about yourself is about "your past." Because who you think you are is basically just made of a collection of memories. That's why it's very effective to become more and more deeply aware of what is now. Actually, it's not even so much about what is now, but rather about what is NOT now. You see? The deeper you become aware of your past being nothing but a projected and imagined fiction, the more you will liberate yourself from the story that you think you are. The realization that time is an illusion has many levels. It goes deeper and is more important for the dispelling of our mistaken identification than most of us think. Look at what is, and you will realize what isn't So my advice to you essentially boils down to meditation. You'll get to a point where the story is so much gone, that you'll feel like you're going crazy or losing all your orientation. That's how you know your doing it right, haha? you'll come back tho, don't worry ...until you don't!

This made my evening oh my god??? As they say in Buddhism, "when you meet Hitler, Mao and Stalin on the road, kill them" Hahaha I can't stop laughing?

Just because AI will one day be able to replicate human art, that doesn't mean that we ourselves will stop making art. People will probably never quite accept the art created by AI as true art, because they see art as an expression of inner and emotional states, which is denied to AI.

@funkychunkymonkey By the way, that's not to say that you can't meditate or do Yoga or whatever, just don't use it for spiritual bypassing. You know?

@SelfHelpGuy In a sense you will melt into Love, just like the raindrop melts into the ocean out of which it emerged. But the melting into Love will not be a new state, that you weren't in before. It will simply be the recognition that you are, were, will always be: boundless. And that when "you" die, it will be nothing but the dispelling of the illusory boundaries that define/are "you". You were never separated from Love, because it's impossible to be separated from Love. Because Love is non-separation. Not-Two-ness. Nonduality.

Wut!? ? Leo is too meta for us mere mortals??

Wanna see something cool? Oh no! The subjective and the objective touch! It's too frightening to truly believe, but he knows it.

A Drop of Rain You journey started as the ocean. Not in the ocean, but as the ocean. An infinite ocean. And there you were, unknowable, undefinable, so infinitely, incomprehensibly vast, that - you were Nothing. No boundaries, anywhere. Nothing, nothing, nothing... No self to be found, not within, not without. Eternity is meaningless. No time, no boredom. Nothing to do, nothing not to do. Neither alive, nor dead. All-encompassing, there can't be anything for you to reject. And so one day, you said to yourself: "get lost!" And lost you got. So definitely and finally lost, that you didn't even know that you got lost. Playing the lake game, playing the cloud game, playing the steam game - you began to seem to separate yourself from yourself. You're still water, but you're starting to wave around. You're starting to move and to stand still, you're starting to flow and to melt, to snow and to rain. Still all you. Right? ...right?... "How did I get here? Who am I?" "You're a drop of rain, stop asking silly questions!" "Leo states that when we die, we go to that infinite center of love. But then also says it may take us 100s of lifetimes to get there. So that would mean when we die we just go into another life, not infinite love. Surely it would make more sense that when you die you'd go to infinite love because that's the end of your self, when you die - your ego dies right?" Where are you to go? Who is there to go? Who is there to merge with what? Who is there to die? You will never merge with infinite love. You will never get there. If you think you got there, you didn't get there. And when it rains, nothing will unite.

Nice

@funkychunkymonkey I strongly suggest you take care of this first instead of trying to become enlightened... There's a time for spirituality. And there's a time for paying off lawyer debts. Guess which comes first.

He says: "[...] I'm saying how even the most enlightened - this spiritual experience can serve a terrible cause." What he should've said is: "how the corruption of the idea* of enlightenment can serve a terrible cause". *idea: by that I don't mean that enlightenment is an idea, but that it certainly would've been to those who used it as an excuse to murder people. Unless my understanding of Zen Devilry is too naive. It probably is, now that I'm thinking about it. Only because you've had (a shallow) Satori that doesn't mean that you won't abuse Satori for even horrible things. Those who would use non-doership as an justification are obviously still quite selfish. Yup. The spiritual ego comes to mind. We will pervert anything in the most subtle and ingenious, intransparent ways to make it serve our crude and selfish desires. Ahh the devil is too clever. Especially in the form of a post-Satori ego-backlash. Which will be sneaky as f*ck.

@EntheogenTruthSeeker Take care, man?

Can you feel any difference between the feeling of "I am" and the feeling of "existence" as such?

You think that because you've had God realization you're done with spirituality? You think you've "arrived"?