snowyowl

@Blackhawk Sorry to hear you're still in a bad way mate. I can't quite understand if you have got to the root cause of your unhappiness, you mentioned 'loneliness, unloved, disliked' which sound more like symptoms than causes. You've seen therapists & psychologists or doctors before, I wonder did they reach a diagnosis? It might help us to give advice and support. Even if you have an incurable condition, there's usually support groups for people with the same problems who can understand what you're going through and be friends with you. Do you feel like this all the time or does it come and go in waves? Could be there's some underlying triggers which bring it on. Keeping a diary of how you feel, what you're eating, drinking, doing etc might help to identify the triggers so you can avoid them. You are liked here by the way, I know we can't show it so easily on a busy internet forum, but I do value your presence here, so do lots of others. I understand now why you sometimes give short pithy replies to our suggestions, it's difficult to string sentences together when you feel rough. It's tough making an effort to reach out for help when you need it most, I know from my own experience, but it really is worth it.

That's my understanding too, 'This' exists which can be heaven, hell, or just plain old mediocrity depending on our state of mind.

@charlie cho did you have any history of childhood trauma or neglect? I'm asking because attention seeking can sometimes be a symptom of early years attachment issues. There's a saying, 'attention seeking is attachment seeking' and young children obviously need healthy attachment with their parents/carers. This may not be relevant to you though.

@The0Self yes I agree. This urge to find something other (fill in the blank, heaven, enlightenment, nirvana etc) reminds me of an old TV series called "Desperately seeking something" which showcases some of the myriad ways we create beliefs and images to chase after. I'm guilty of it too of course, part of me still wants my meditation and spiritual practice to do something, show me something, take me somewhere. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperately_Seeking_Something

Letting go of techniques into a state of emptiness (or fullness if you prefer) is such a great feeling of release isn't it? Letting-go helps me with stress and anxiety. I also use a variation on this, which I learned from Culadasa: let it come, let it be, let it go. Don't resist feelings when they arise, give them space while they're here, and don't cling to them when they're on the way out. Everything is temporary, feelings are there for a reason and manipulating them only causes more suffering.

Hi all, It's taken me all this time to catch up with all the latest news in the forum, including the tragic news about Sunny.My condolences to his family and friends. I keep coming back to how this group of us associated with actualized.org see ourselves, there's a range of thinking on this point. Some want a simple internet forum of essentially anonymous individuals, discussing spirituality with full disclaimers that we aren't responsible for what we say. On the other end of the spectrum others call this gathering a community, which to me carries suggestions of closer connections, caring about each other, taking more responsibility for eachother, seeing ourselves as a connected community. There's shades inbetween too of course. Actualized.org itself is a limited company run by Leo as his right livelihood, to offer his teachings to the world. It's a good business model, Leo earns a living and anyone can access advanced teachings free. Leo is in charge, and like any other small business it isn't democratic. The forum has a simple hierarchy with Leo on top and mods inbetween. Comparing this forum with others I belong to, most of them are run autocratically by whoever originally set them up, at least that saves a whole lot of bureaucracy and politics. While that's fine for a basic forum, if we're intending to become a true spiritual community, do we want to keep going long-term as a kind of monarchy? That would feed into the accusations of being a cult. On the other hand, do we have the stomach and commitment to evolve into a democratic spiritual organisation?

@iceprincess Where did you get the quote from? It comes over as someone very disempowered, not taking responsibility for their own diet. There are lots of healthy food choices available in the shops, no-one is forcing junk food on you. You just need to take ownership, educate yourself, see the truth about the supermarkets, processed food and advertising industries. The quote also seems like the person is alienated from their society, an 'us and them' attitude with a vaguely defined but powerful group called 'the establishment' separate from the community. I'm not sure if I'm up to giving a stage yellow perspective though

"Illusion. Anything that seems to be something that it is not." Wiktionary. There is 'something' but thought misinterprets it. The illusion is separateness; oneness misidentifying itself as twoness.

Sorry to hear you're feeling rough again friend. I don't want to repeat myself so sending love instead

Yeah, trying to time market peaks & troughs is very tough - not just cryptos but all markets really. They tend to over-react in both directions due to human greed on the way up, and fear on the way down. And the fractal nature of market valuations means there's lots of small fluctuations within the overall trend, making it harder to know when you're at a true top/bottom, or something like a 'dead cat bounce'. With traditional investments like shares and property you can at least look at fundamentals to help you like profitability, debt and interest rates to filter out some of the emotional background noise. I'm not so sure with currency trading. My advice is to do research in proportion to the amount of money you want to invest.

Leo's teachings, forum posts etc are all just pointers made out of words. To actually feel the depth needs work and practice, at least for most of us. Keep digging into it, dive in and experience it for yourself

@Podie45 sorry to hear you've got no-one to talk to, feel free to vent if it helps, let it out, we're listening bro. Can we make this forum into one little corner of the world where you don't feel sick?

If we're a crazy bullshitting animal, then you're totally free, nothing is serious and it's all mad. Consider too the relativism of all this: bullshit is a waste product for the bull and food for plants and flies. Flat Earth is a good working assumption if you're just popping out to the shops, or spend your whole life in a little village. If you want to travel the world, a spherical Earth is accurate enough. But if you're a scientist or cartographer then you need to know about oblate spheroids. Which theory is more true? Ok, the oblate spheroid, but is it bs to ignore that and go with what works for your situation? It's like saying Newtonian physics is bs because it's less accurate than relativity and quantum mechanics, but it's still fine for most things in life.

@Gabith Hi. I'm a bit confused, the technique you describe sounds more like mindfulness of breathing (anapanasati) than vipassana (insight). But imo they can work well together, the breath technique is good for developing concentration and relaxation. Sounds like you're well established in that technique and ready to move on It's a vast subject though, although I could suggest some techniques which worked for me, there's no guarantee they're right for you. Have you seen Leo's videos on meditation? I'd also do plenty of reading and research and experimenting, you're likely to find some approaches gel more with your intuition and just feel right.

@greatfruit I'm learning about the history. Are you saying the Palestinian politicians aren't willing to compromise and they want the whole area of Israel + Palestine as a Palestinian state, and just get rid of Israel altogether?

The problem is, we don't know who or what we are right now. If we take that same ignorance with us through the process of physical dying of the body, how do we expect to know what we are afterwards? The groundwork for this is seeing clearly the present moment.

The I is the self-reflective or self-referencing ability of thought. It's part of our survival strategy but is just a thought so never had separate existence, only apparent existence. It can't find itself in the same way as a mirror can't reflect itself, or a finger point to itself. How old this ability is, is sometime in evolutionary history perhaps several million years, maybe longer if some other species can do it too.

"This is death already" - Jim Newman. No need to pray for death, the thought that I have this life is illusion. Happy belated birthday

@Javfly33 glad to hear we've tired you out of all the mental gymnastics and inspired your actual practice, good luck and godspeed

We aren't independent of this. From the POV of the mind (I don't experience any other), the brain is an external object, seen outside; mind is the internal subject, seeing from inside.

@joshu Ok I'm no expert on the Middle East I'll put that on the table first. But if we're talking about the 1920s I guess that was the era of fallout from the first world war. Up till then, most of the region was occupied by the Ottoman empire for hundreds of years. My impression is (please correct me if I'm wrong) that monotheists like Jews and Christians were tolerated but kept as second class citizens. In the 20s they also had the carving up of places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon by the WW1 victors - with a close eye on oil, and Russian communist influence. You're right there were various diplomatic efforts, my country the UK was heavily involved in Palestine/Israel until we found it ungovernable and gave up after WW2, handing it over to the UN to sort out. Ofc the holocaust was a factor by then too... I'm also thinking that the reason why there's such a big pro-Israeli lobby in the US is because it was a refuge for persecuted Jews around the world for many years.

It's a habit to think of God and Universe as two, connected by a process of Creation (or imagining). Not so easy to see it as One. I tend to think of finite things like me, you, the physical universe etc as contractions or localisations of the infinite. Even space and time are contractions, so we can't really talk about 'after' infinite merger, because if we've still got time, we're still in a finite bubble. Trying to imagine or think about the infinite keeps us bounded in the finite so this great question faces us with a contradiction, like all good koans. We need to suddenly 'just see', intuit (into-it), the infinite that's already co-existing with the finite.

This reminds me of a TV programme I watched a few months ago about the additives used in plastics causing low sperm counts. Seems like we're sleepwalking into a massive issue at a time when many countries are already seeing population declines. Not to mention all the awful diseases we're giving ourselves. We can't all rely on immigration to solve this one. I'm beginning to think we're already at, or just beyond, the limits of peak stage orange in the industrialised countries and desperately need more green living if we want to have any kind of sustainability.

@Someone here you could be right anyway, I've heard of people having crazy experiences with fear & anxiety, like out of body experiences and depersonalisation - perhaps it's a kind of defence mechanism. Materialists go on to say that near-death-experiences like OOBEs, going down a tunnel, seeing the bright white light, extremely loving beings etc is a result of the brain chemistry going haywire when close to physical death. Depends if consciousness is limited to the brain, I can't prove that to you either way.

So how do you know this either without experiencing physical death? I agree it sure looks that way to those of us who are alive and experiencing the death of someone else. But from the pov of the dying person, don't they have to let go of everything including thoughts whether the process is good or bad? Heck, I just fell in the same trap myself, assuming I can know something outside my direct experience of the Now