Oppositionless

So your idea of awakening is a materialist's version death / nonexistence? Is that what you're saying?

@Dodo I feel awareness is only one aspect of God. In some sense it's the most important but it's not the totality. Theres also love, intelligence, imagination, will and others.

I don't do self inquiry until I'm in a deep meditation state, otherwise I find it doesn't work. If I do 20 minutes of kriya and then meditate another 10 minutes, thats when self inquiry makes sense.

@Natasha Tori Maru I'm so excited for spring and going outside and looking at flowers more @Joseph Maynor yeah I'm starting to chill out too. I did kriya yoga every day for ~7 weeks and realized this morning I didn't do it. Not was too lazy I just completely didn't remember.

first blog post is done. this was brutal (fun) lol https://oppositionless.substack.com/p/how-spirituality-prevented-me-from the goal is still one blog post and one youtube video a week. I'm excited for making it, what I'm dreading is marketing. I don't want to post links on my personal social media but I will.

Today I bought a pillow, face wash, moisturizing lotion, deodorant, and two journals. Let's fucking go!!! From my journal "It's not even close, this is the best I've felt in my entire life, all that's missing is spending more time outside with my shirt off." The last time I felt this good I spent all day outside with my shirt off, but that was pre-trauma hehe. first blog post is 90% finished. It should be posted by fairly early tomorrow. It's going to be on Substack and I'll drop the link. I need to get a haircut before I make my first YouTube video. Lol

You're speaking my language! I found starting doing spiritual practices every day helps. It will simultaneously make you less worried about understanding reality and raise your consciousness so you will understand more. Win-win!

yep, I think Leo's blog video he linked shows you that part. I feel you, I was too scared to vape it the first half dozen or so times. Vaping hits like a freight train.

Don't snort (or plug) freebase. Convert it to a salt by dropping a little vinegar onto it. Freebase is for vaping (my preferred method).

The guest after Leo in that podcast was Formscapes, which is nuts to me bc I have been watching his videos and I was the first person to mention him on the forum. but the real kicker is that this synchronicity happened right as I decided I'm gonna start making YouTube videos myself. God is speaking. the goal of my kriya practice right now is to heal executive dysfunction: it's really fucking hard for me to do basic self care things. Like buying the damn tripod. And buying a new pillow. And a new pair of New Balances. And light bulbs . Fuck my life sometimes, I could have started creating so much sooner if I could just fucking DO STUFF

Yeah I know the feeling. I heard about the life review concept from near death experiences and was looking forward to dying so I could make things right. But it's not a productive mindset, and it cheapens life unnecessarily. If I were you I would try to reconcile now, they might be able to hear you even if you can't hear them. Maybe make a ritual of it.

New balance

@Yimpa 😂😂

this is how the first blog post is coming so far. not quite sure where to go next but it's close I'm open to feedback , just please be kind lol : How I Used Spirituality to Avoid Development, and an Unconventional Take on Spiritual Bypassing There’s a difference between believing something profound and experiencing something profound. And there’s an even bigger difference between experiencing something profound and becoming someone profound. I began engaging with spiritual ideas at a young age. It began in Catholic school, I would go to church and feel moved, sometimes to tears. I felt as if I was making contact with something beyond myself, maybe God, or maybe just an indescribable something which transcended my material life and was simultaneously full of love. When I was 15, a friend of mine who was older and cooler than me introduced me to his new religion, called Wicca. He told me about magick (as opposed to magic) as a ritualistic method of advancing ones life by harnessing universal forces. He also introduced me to the power of psychedelic drugs, and astral projection, which is the ability to consciously eject the perceiving self from the physical body. This was simply the coolest thing I ever heard of. I didn’t join his religion but I began reading, and watching videos. I tried, and failed, to astral project until I got sick of trying. I learned about nonduality, the idea that the self (the ego) is an illusion and that transcending it leads to liberation, the end of suffering. While I was learning, I was also developing a not-so-subtle feeling of superiority. I was in high school and later college, and I believed that the people around me, even my friends, were ever so slightly lesser than me, that I was wiser and more enlightened than them because I had the secret knowledge and they did not. Underneath this was, ironically, a profound sense of inferiority. I had high-achieving friends with tangible, physical plans for their lives. They wanted to be lawyers, doctors, engineers and knew the steps to accomplish their goals. And something else was developing. This was an all-consuming need to discover the ultimate answers to life, the universe and everything with rigorous research, logic and debate. This was actually the beginning of my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but that wasn’t separate from an authentic spiritual desire. Some days I would spend up to 8 or even 10 to 12 hours locked into an internal quest for certainty regarding my new spiritual knowledge. If I found someone on the internet who disagreed, often on YouTube, I would post take-downs in the comment section. When I got a notification that someone had responded to my comment, I felt terror. Had they proven me wrong and thus undermined my entire ikigai? Hours upon hours of philosophy, and a handful of weird experiences along the way led to, not enlightenment or truth, but anxiety and many, many sleepless nights. Something needed to change, not for some hypothetical goal called “enlightenment” but simply for a decent, non-neurotic relationship with life and my own mind. Before I go into the specifics of how I began to change, I want to address spiritual bypassing as a phenomenon. This is, as the title suggests, an unconventional take on spiritual bypassing. Most people who spiritually bypass don’t have Existential OCD, they aren’t spending 12 hours a day in YouTube metaphysics debates. But the core thread, of using spirituality to avoid real growth, is quite common. There are as many examples of spiritual bypassing as there are spiritual seekers, and almost every seeker does it or did it along their journey. Some other examples include the person in an unhappy relationship who uses positive psychology to gaslight themself into believing their relationship is actually helping them, or the psychedelic user who trips faster than integration can keep up, taking ever-higher doses in the hope of finally “arriving.” Surrender, Courage, Discipline, Compassion. For me, bypassing was about creating a sophisticated artifice of spiritual knowledge to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty, and with uncertainty, tangible action and development. For others it could be quite the opposite, using spiritual ideas or experiences to avoid the uncomfortable certainty life sometimes gives us. Either way there is an avoidance of reality going on, and being avoidant towards reality stalls personal development. This leads to the first virtue which has been changing my life: Surrender.

I've done that too and it was great. What I found even better was that while I do that I'm also mindlessly raising my state of consciousness. The past few months I have become a consciousness-raising robot.