Mulky

I'm busy so I'm not going to read anything in your entire post or any of the other posters except for your title and respond. Almost every addiction will yield less pleasure and more pain over time, all of them in fact, even ones that seem reasonable like sex or junk food. Meditation is the only thing you can be addicted to that will yield more pleasure and less pain over time. this also refers to any kind of mindfulness, present moment awareness, or in any way becoming more established in a natural meditative state reguardless of what you are doing at the time.

If you're pretty new, and especially if you're still knee deep in logic, this might help. If your not in logic be careful overdoing this as you can rapidly lower your state of conciousness and become completely blinded to that fact for who knows how long(It might actually be happening to me right now). I'm going to ask you to use just a bit of logic for a specific purpose for a small amount of time and then let it go. People are currently obsessed with logic, practically worship it, but they don't do it any justice, because they ignore it's ability to completely destroy any sense of self, they have a blind spot to all logic that proves free will doesn't exist, everything is connected, there is no individual self, when clearly these things are true. Because their logic is mostly to maintain the ego, they conveniently abandon it when someone uses it to destroy the ego or since of individuality. From be as you are, a book from the teaches of Ramana Maharshi, who is the biggest teacher of self inquiry I know about. "It will be remembered that in the chapter on Self awareness and Self ignorance, Sri Ramana maintained that Self-realization could be brought about merely by giving up the idea that there is an individual self which functions through the body and the mind" As long as you apply some logic to this, and don't give yourself self preserving logic blind spots(aka doing everything you can to believe in free will even though if you look at it at all you'll find it doesn't make any sense and is in fact impossible). Bring everything you learned in school, such as cause and effect, if you're really honest with yourself you'll find the idea of an individual self makes absolutely no sense, it's all just 1 infinite thing. Your best definition of a self you could make would be like a system contained within "your body", but clearly we can see that system is effected by, effecting, and connected with everything else so absolutely that if you were to define yourself as a system that system would have to be all of existence.

Just my approach Don't reject or deny anything, cause if you do that then the sense of I will become connected with a sense of tightness and rejection, and you will blind yourself to whatever you think you are right now. Accept and love what you think you are right now and keep looking deeper. Look for what you think/feel like you are right now, and accept it, like feel good about it, then look deeper. For a long time I would try to ignore what I thought I was at the moment, trying to just get the pure self,but this made a big wall, get all soft and see whatever you feel like you are and keep looking more but let everything be as you go. You;ll forget your identity faster when you just look at it and accept it and then look deeper, than if you somehow try to go straight to the deeper while trying to block out all your thoughts of identity. Don't indulge identity, just be cool with it appearing and then going away cause you accepted it's appearance and let it sort of morph around and change into whatever. Cause you don't really know what you are, but theres like this crazy movement all the time with all sorts of ideas of what you are, how you relate to things, etc. So you just watch that move around remaining completely clueless, you're just watching a show, you're completely lost in a sense, I mean what the heck are you? Whether you're there or not, you're still there. If when doing self inquiry an image of yourself and your job and family appears fine, whether that's you or not the reaction is the same, feel good about and love and accept it. If you see another person on the street what you should do is love and accept them, if you see an image of yourself, if its not you but some phenomenon in life, you should still love and accept it, if it's you, same thing, it's just a safe bet amidst the times when you're barely thinking and thus not controlling things, to just see, love, accept, it might be the real you, it might not, but either way this is a good response. This will clear out everything that isn't "real" gets sort of accepted so much it just automactially morphs in with the rest of reality and starts to flow and dance with it. I mean, literally everything is you anyway, so you could do self inquiry and pretty much feel like everything that comes up is you, it's just as much you as anything else. Brain is fried, peace.

So there's let's say 7 billion people on planet earth. What an enlightened person does is he or she solves 1/7,000,000,000 of the problem, and that's the best anyone can do.

I think here's what people really care about. They want to know if they are there at all, as able to experience anything, forever. People want to continue to exist forever, it's not important as what, just so long as being alive is there, which is, the ability to be aware of anything at all. No matter what you leave behind, it's not the way of staying alive people want, having kids won't keep you alive as something that continues to live after the body dies, you won't be there. The body breaking down and going into nature and all the matter that made you up still existing won't do you any good, you won't be there to experience any of that, your conciousness won't be inside of a plant that came from your dead body, you won't be there seeing it. Becoming famous, leaving a legacy behind, being part of human history, even if people talk about you after you die, the instant you die none of that will exist for you anymore, it won't matter if people loved you or hated you, or didn't care at all. Sitting here knowing you are gonna die one day and nothing will ever exist for you after that, and nothing in your entire life matters at all, puts you as the "agent" of your life in a difficult spot, because now what do you do. If you didn't know any of that, you would live your life appropriately, things would seem to matter, and while you were alive everything would feel right and important, and you would be motivated to do things. Feeling your life doesn't really matter, it's impossible to care about or do anything(at least for me right now). Knowing your going to die makes it hard to take interest in yourself, and yet here you are, with 50 or so years left to hang out, not being excited about anything you do. This is how I feel right now, and I'm not sure how to get out of it. I have been on this path for about 5 years and this is one of the darkest times I've had. I have heard and want to believe I as awareness lives on after death, with like a clean slate, I've even felt like that before, but right now I feel sad about how the body has to slowly lose it's beauty and youth, and then we have to hang out for 50 more years. I really see the emptiness of everything we do, and I just don't feel like doing anything ever again, I also don't feel like being anyone, at least not anyone anybody else can see. I feel like nobody has ever been able to see the real me, why bother continueing to have these pointless painful interactions with people that make me not feel like myself.I felt this way before, and it was happier, but this time it feels worse, I'm not sure where I went wrong here.

Keep living your life as normal, don't talk about any of this too much with your family. Don't freak your kid or wife out, they probably need your help. Do everything internally without talking about it. Be free inside without running off from your family. Like just be really present and mindful while being around your family, but only you know about your family situation.

During my time of meditating I have noticed strange phenomenon from other people in relation to my state of consciousness, especially family members, curious if I am insane or if anyone else has noticed this. I'll just make a list below. -Family members will up their game, people who will normally watch a pleasant show and be in a decent mood will most likely have law and order on the tv and be irritable when you emerge from a meditation session. They will subconsciously try to undo any of your gains without even realizing it. -People will attempt to leech off of you, but by not understanding that you are not enlightened, will not understand the negativity they are slowely feeding you will eventually pull you down to their level and they will not be able to leech off of you any more. -If you are in zen, or extremely blissed out, nearby people will attempt to come up to you and talk about something disturbing, or at least overly mentally engaging. -Meditating near a family member will usually make them agitated, certain pets as well. -relating a happy realization you have had will result in a massive argument with almost anyone, especially a family member. -Any realization that removes a limiting belief your parents gave you will cause an angry reaction from them, they will become afraid and try to reinforce the old belief, best not to talk about any of this with family. -being in a higher state of conscousness around people you aren't related to, such as at work, will mostly have a positive effect on them, as long as you can avoid having too many overly mental conversations. The following are things people tend to do to keep each other in lower states of consciousness all the time, regardless of who they are around. -Put too much thought data everywhere, billboards, signs, screens, spoken words, devices, etc. -Engage eachother in overly mental conversations, usually negative. -Plug into the collective mind of society, and feed it back to eachother, thus reproducing it and growing the very things they are complaining about(i supposed technically I'm doing that right now) Watching bad news and talking about it, thus creating a negative feedback loop on a massive scale. An aware person can sense the thing that causes what we don't like, a certain ugliness, you can sense it in an advertisement, hear it in the voice of a news anchor, see it pasted all over the walls of a breakroom at work. It sticks out like a sore thumb if you can see the beauty all over in life, but if you can't it just seems normal, and it goes to work on you without you noticing it. People don't know that ugliness is what is causing all the problems, what is making people feel bad and causing them to put in their part in the overall "problems" they are complainging about, through the negative energy of it. but instead people keep feeding that ugliness and fighting lesser causes, and every inch of that fight is filled with that pure ugliness. People think they will find happiness in objects, objects make them unhappy , they try to find the solution in another one, never knowing that they need less, they need more space, more quiet, less fights, less words, less advice on billboards, less action, less ambition, less justice, less morality, and to find pure true eternal good Sorry if this went a bit off topic, had alot to get out, thanks

I noticed something going on a couple months ago. Ive seen a few people lately outside in the city who seemed to have just had an awakening, based on how they were behaving, one of them I talked to about it and everything he said about his experience seemed to add up to it. I had a weird though and wondered if some kind of big awakening was going on before I read this post, maybe it is.

He mentions something done like this during the video, to overload a certain part of the brain, to max a person out on the fear of death people often experience right before enlightenment, and then straight into the peace afterwords. I don't know much about the physical brain stuff involved in this, but this guy seems to have some knowledge about it.

To say something isn't real is to simply say it is not something other than what it is. Everything is real, it's just not something other than what it is. A thought is real, it's just not anything other than a thought. A thought about a chair is real, just as itself, but it's not anything else, it's not a chair. When people say a thought isn't real, that simply serves to not give a mistaken idea of it as something else, it's just a thought, and never anything else. even if i imagine something wierd in my mind, it's real as whatever an imagined thing is, but that's it, it's not also something else that you can sense percieve without thought.

Since starting down this path and learning what is good for my mind, I find there is literally no suitable entertainment, it is all insane. Besides some sort of ambient fractal video, or looking at some kind of art, or listening to music, almost all entertainment makes me feel bad now, I have no idea why. Should I not be taking in entertainment anymore? Everything is overly edited and too loud, jarring and sort of low attention span feeling. I can literally feel the inside of my body get tight when I watch almost any show or movie, I feel like almost anything on a screen is hurting my mind or poisoning me in some way. I feel I have to guard myself from advertising, as I can see the damage it can do. Almost every show or movie is either exremely negative, or offers to make the viewer feel good through something equally as crappy, such as revenge or justice, or getting some bad guy. All of those things feel bad to me, getting a bad guy just feels crappy now, how can anyone enjoy that? Most of my family constantly has the tv on watching a show about crimes and punishment. They don't know they are feeding a sense of justice and non forgiveness and that it hurts them, and I feel like it poisons my mind if i even walk through the room, I can feel like a poison in my body when I'm exposed to something like that. It's either all gray and depressing, or it's overly edited, loud, and annoying. I feel like people don't even know what real life looks like, because they feel depressing things are realistic, not knowing it's their own mind making things look depressing to them, it's silly. We're all looking for enlightenment on this forum, but sometimes we just want to have pointless fun, alone, isn't that still ok, or should we give that up? And is there anything at all that can be watched strictly for fun that is sorta on the same frequency we are on?

I find the sense of equanimity I feel in real life doesn't work on a screen for some reason. Like I can see the beauty of like the ground, doing nothing, but that same sense doesn't come to me through a screen ever. Even something normally considered scary ugly or bad is still beautiful in real life, but not on a screen. Like nature, to me the beauty of nature doesn't come to me through a screen. I guess in the past watching something was a comfort thing, but now I find I'm always less happy watching a screen than I would be otherwise. I'm not really looking for a show or movie about enlightenment, I'm just looking for some entertainment that has some beauty and like calm to it, maybe even some formlessness and randomness and not mentalness to it.

I am no expert on anything, but here is a notion that has been popping into my mind alot lately. What determines our progress toward enlightenment, is not how often we meditate to a certain level of deepness, but how deep our deepest meditation session has been(so long as it is somewhat recent). To sit and meditate for 30 minutes a day and only to the same depth each time, is only good for maintenance. If we really want to become enlightened, we have to keep going when it gets scary and uncomfortable, new and expansive, somewhere we haven't been before, a new frontier. In my mind, if you sit down to meditate and haven't gone deeper and further than before, you're just maintaining. A man can meditate 30 minutes a day for 20 years, and another guy can who has just found out about meditation can sit down and meditate 10 hours straight and penetrate deeper and establish himself at a deeper level permanently, than the 30 minute guy. At the same time, someone can meditate for 5 minutes and if they let go completely could finish the task just like that. In my mind it's how courageous you are to keep going and let the barriers dissolve, whether it takes you 5 minutes or 7 days, the depth of your deepest meditation is the most important thing, not how many times you meditate.

I get that neck popping when I meditate alot. I can just sit there and it will continually make a clicking sound over and over for up to like 30 mintus straight.

Ya keep doing that . No need to read or think about anything, unless you need help later.

I recently discovered a hack for this, don't look in the mirror. Seriously, only look at your reflection if it's absolutely necessary. The nerves in your face react to what you think your face looks like, and your emotions are heavily tied in with your face and it's nerves. Now your asking your face and it's emotional processing to work properly while at the same time carrying around an idea of what your face looks like, for some reason this screws with the whole process. If you have no idea how you appear, all of your nerves will function properly, if it's mixed with an idea about yourself, it will create some wierd loop that fouls it all up.

All the pain and problems people are talking about is just something you have to go through, you'll have to go through the same thing even if you attempt to become enlightened by any other means. Just go do breathing meditation outside for several hours, deepening your breath and looking inside. All along the way something will tell you to stop doing it, but just keep going. You'll be crazy for a couple years just keep going. Edit:You might be able to work through it faster, and not have a long period of time where you are mentally unstable, I think it has more to do with what else is going on in your life. If you spent alot of time alone in quiet, you could maybe get it done faster, but if you keep trying to go to work or school, then ya you might be crazy for a while, just a tad bit though its worth it.

ya

I don't really think many people have become enlightened for real, like Ramana, or Tolle. I think alot of teachers have had tastes of enlightenment and gone through their experiences, and not always given the best advice. Even some of the most highly reguarded teachers, still seem to have a very obvious ego, although only they know for sure. It's extremely easy to make progress on this path when you have absolutely nothing, and you can easily let go of everything. If you can't let go of absolutely everything, it will be very hard, you can feel it in your body. Just because a guy knows alot about pursuing enlightenment, has experienced the enlightened state, etc, means he's qualified to give good advice. Maybe theres pain involved in this path, but I guarantee the other way is complete pain by comparison.