Bodhitree

If you want something a little bit less self-help, you could try the Hornblower series, very stage orange.

@tatsumaru I rather agree, in the end business is meaningless. Spirituality is the only thing that can help you, and if money allows it is best to just focus on meditation, retreats and the best teachers you can find. There is a Tibetan Buddhist teaching, called Atisha’s nine-point meditation on death, which puts it rather clearly… 1 Death is inevitable. No one is exempt. 2 Our life span is ever-decreasing. Each breath brings us closer to death. 3 Death will indeed come, whether or not we are prepared. 4 Human life expectancy is uncertain. Death can come at any time. 5 There are many causes of death – even habits, desires and accidents are precipitants. 6 The human body is fragile and vulnerable. Our life hangs by a breath. 7 At the time of death, material resources are of no use to us. 8 Our loved ones cannot keep us from death. There is no delaying it. 9 Our body cannot help us at the time of death. Only spiritual practice can help me prepare.

Listening to the sound of raindrops in the forest can also help.

I like listening to the talks of Terence McKenna on YouTube to get some idea of what psychedelics are like. Now there was a man of wide and copious experience in this field, he tried many different substances and reported on it. But he was not really a spiritual person, even after many sessions, which leads me to believe that not everyone interprets their experiences in a spiritual way.

@Mips it sounds like you already have an excellent relationship with your wife. I doubt whether psychedelics will change that.

The world is full of religions, which all espouse different beliefs. How do we determine what is true? It seems to me that if you follow the rules of evidence that very little of what we are told from spiritual sources actually can be proven. So suppose we go to our personal experience, to what extent can we trust our personal experience? Psychedelics seem wonderful but are they better than for example dreams?

So this is a statement that is in the trend of Neo-Advaita. It belongs with a certain realisation, which I have not had. I could just accept the ideas, but then it becomes a belief, like many others on the surface of mind. The process of revolution, of a renewal in thinking, comes with the experience of realisation. The motivation, to provide a shock that frees one from the endless gyrations of the mind, is a kind and generous one. But such a shock is only temporary unless accompanied by realisation.

@Nahm Yes, I get that. But personally I haven’t experienced unity, so I am just operating on the reports of others. And I have experienced a great many other states of mind, so I know how tricky the mind can get. So it seems to me that my mind is just experiencing various dramas with other fragments of mind, some of which are figments of the imagination. It’s an endless play of shadows. Actually that’s not entirely true, fragments of mind do unify into more significant segments when meditating, it’s an effect Ive noticed while observing fragments. Interesting.

I must admit, I just like forums with a spiritual theme. I hang out on a few different ones, and I like the young crowd here. But I’ve been into spirituality for a long time, kinda grew up with it, although recently I have been more into studying Buddhism.

@Nahm So, talking about the big truth… I’ve been thinking about this some, and going along with the ‘big truth’ asks of me that I engage in a series of mental gymnastics. I think it is like this. There is the body, there is the mind, there is a person. These things can be observed, and are part of the natural arrangement that we humans have been gifted with. What we are really talking about is the nature of mind and the senses, it seems to me. How the experience of unity fits into things I am not quite sure of. I will think on it some more.

@Eternal Unity Doctors can be a bit like that, especially with patients with mental health symptoms. But did you know that only about 1 in 5 people who hear voices actually end up contacting mental health services? It’s a lot more common than the doctors would have you think, even if a lot of those who keep it quiet can do so because they just hear an occasional voice, often the voice of a family member. There is a whole separate support network for “voice hearers” which is not managed by doctors but by volunteers. It is not easy to give these kinds of experiences a place in spiritual growth. I recall seeing the documentary Crazywise which talks some about shamans and how they would see these things as a talent for seeing into another world. But in western society it is not straightforward, everything gets ‘medicalised’ and buried under a load of pills. Finding what it means to you as a spiritual person takes a lot of time if you don’t have a guide.

@Nahm Thanks, that resonates (and shocks). Even though the ‘big truth’ was not exactly what I was looking for, it’s cool, it helps.

@ivankiss Seeking energy in my experience is not really helpful, it tends to do a lot of bypassing. It has been better for me to cultivate flourishing energy, that which helps us unfold the things that are knotted together. If you can bring everything to a flowering, you internally grow rich. Wishing you all the best…

You should listen to some Terence McKenna, talking about his (psychedelic) experiences with The Mushroom. He seemed pretty convinced it was something on the order of an alien intelligence.

My own experiences have become more and more focussed, less scattered in different areas. Occasionally I hear voices, and sometimes when I try to sleep I have short visions, I experience visitors, some good, some bad. But I take the general point of view that one should let these things come and go of their own accord, and not attach too much importance to them. If you make them important, they begin to distort what you think and do, you give them a certain power over you. It is like it is a test, where they search among all the things you care about for those subjects which will move you. I once had a voice that said it was God. I wasn’t particularly religious at the time so I was not hugely affected, but that is the kind of trick it will play on you. So if you ever decide to lower your medications that’s something you may encounter. For me, these things started not long after I kind of dared the universe, I said, if there is anything left for me to do on a spiritual level, just bring it on. And within six months, I started hearing voices. At first I was ambivalent about it, it was very confusing. Of course the doctors said, unless you take medication we can’t help you. But gradually over the years it has gotten easier.

What do you mean by ultimate truth? Are we talking about cosmic mind, the answer to all questions? Or is it just the experience of Oneness, which could be said to be an ultimate truth?

One important contribution that I have taken to heart is ehipassiko, the Buddha’s statement to come and see for yourself the truth of any teaching, and to discard those things which you find not to be true. You can take that statement and apply it to any teaching, whether from a guru, from a religion or from a book. It’s where you yourself take responsibility for what you believe. In a way, science is an extension of that. It brings more sophisticated tools to determining what you yourself believe to be true, and it brings in a ‘bedrock of belief in natural processes’. If you have a scientific education you will know that lightning is no mystery, that there is no thunder god up there making bolts and throwing them. Together, ehipassiko and science rule out a lot of things that in the past had myths and cults around them. It means we should shift our boundaries, take our spiritual desires and draw from a different well.

Waiting on my second jab of the Pfizer in a few days. Vaccines seem to work to shield us, so I don’t see any reason not to take it.

The role of understanding is definitely interesting. Understand the mind and many things become clear.

@Eternal Unity wishing you all the best. I’ve had my own brush with psychiatry and medication, although my diagnosis is not as severe. I think it’s important to look beyond the biomedical paradigm, the medications have a place but they only suppress the symptoms, they don’t guide you deeper into who you are, and the episodes you experience are part of that. It’s important to explore these things. I would recommend watching the documentary Crazywise, it tells the story beautifully.

I don’t see any signs of real maturity here, from these supposedly highly developed humans.

Yes, I’ve noticed this as well.

@Fearey perhaps Gesundheit2’s suggestion of looking at the ego stages model might be good for you. In any case I wish you the best.

@Fearey That does sound to me like you might end up, consciously or unconsciously, gaming the spiral dynamics stages. The way you have presented it in this post does sound like you’re quite caught up in them and the whole idea of progress through them, while in fact it’s just a set of definitions for a number of states of being that are only loosely related. Are you sure you’re not an Orange-style achiever at heart?

Interesting reading, this topic. Generally I don’t pay much mind to human development models, as guides to the path I do not find them very helpful since often they just set out certain markers without much understanding of the evolutionary process itself. So a question for you @Fearey do you try to use the stages as a guide? How do you feel the integral model influences your progress?