Bodhitree

I’d suggest reading the Skeptic’s Annotated Quran, to point out contradictions, false prophecies, violence, sex and so on. It’s pretty full of this stuff. http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/Quran/

Would knowing exactly what happens be of any real benefit to you? Knowing is the mind’s game, it’s a striving for completeness which is ultimately futile, there are always more frontiers to knowledge.

I saw that this relatively small search engine, Ecosia, was now available as a default search engine for iPhone and iPad. So I decided to do a little research. Basically the idea is to take the revenue generated by the search engine, and use it for planting trees. They’ve already planted 100 million trees, I think that’s very impressive. They’re also privacy-friendly and won’t track your data, and are very transparent about their financials and the projects they undertake. The actual search results come from Microsoft’s Bing engine, so qualitatively you don’t lose much compared to Google. They seem to have set up the business in a very solid way. So I have switched my own devices from Google to Ecosia, if I can in this way contribute by planting 600 trees a year then I feel I am doing a great hing for the environment. It’s the kind of business I wish I had started, and I would very much enjoy working for.

Maps of the world can certainly lead you to see illusions. The map is not the territory, but it is our mental representation of the territory, and you can find yourself reacting to what’s on the map even if it makes no sense. The thing to do is to hold your thoughts loosely, always be prepared for discrepancies between our mental representation of what’s over the next hill and what is truly over the next hill. Rewrite the map when you find it is wrong.

Everybody has their own path, and very few people are truly open to being helped, is my experience. You can leave helpful hints, and sometimes someone will pick something up and be helped. But you’re only facilitating, you left the breadcrumbs and they helped themselves. It’s best not to become too attached.

The Buddha once said, you should test the teachings, and if you find them to be false, discard them. I’ve long held that as a core belief, to approaching books on self help, religion, guru’s, all sorts. Religion isn’t really necessary anymore, but being a good man or woman is. Invite compassion in your life, and don’t be fooled into thinking anything at all is of great importance.

@mandyjw I think you are absolutely right about not shaming people. Most folks go through some form of mental health challenge during their lifetime, and given the right environment those experiences can be a source of growth. I’d encourage people to be sensitive towards those who are a bit down or acting weird. On the other hand, people who are on the very tough end of the spectrum need to realise that their primary form of aid is likely to come from professionals. Spirituality is great, but some people get lost in it, or expect unrealistic results from it.

You could try the Osho Ashram in Poona, it’s a kind of spiritual resort, lots of marble, very clean, many plants.

The right way to approach spirituality is to become better than just being well. The wrong way to approach spirituality is to try to use its lens to recast all your difficulties as spiritual. Most mental health professionals don’t understand that, and don’t see when spirituality is keeping people back, and when it is beneficial.

Start with focussing on something, for example counting in and out breaths from 1 to 10 and then starting again at 1, and doing that for 5 minutes. Whenever your thoughts carry you away, return to counting the breath. Meditation can be that simple. You can read up on shamatha and vipassāna, the two methods of Buddhist meditation which are often recommended to develop in tandem. The first is for calming the mind, the second is for insight. Counting the breath is a bit of a beginners exercise, it gets more difficult when you try to do things like ‘just sitting’.

@Nahm Perhaps you mean Geh-sus from The Big Lebowski... now that was a fine piece of acting.

I think Sadhguru is a fake. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and he has not supplied any. The way he conducts his financial affairs, it sounds like he will take sponsorship deals any day now. His videos, his eyes, the way he talks, I just can’t imagine that he might be the real deal. Enlightened people can be tricksters like George Gurdjieff, but even the trickster gurus are careful with the truth.

I would agree with @Nahm ... it’s an opportunity to work with whatever trauma triggered it. If you can cope with your fear, you can see if you can find out exactly what it was, and potentially resolve it for good.

It seems to me that the root of your problem is that you’re trying to escape your own mind with the Benzo’s, and then you talk about how enchanted you are with your own fantasy. Meditation can help you quieten your thoughts, if you take the time to learn it and apply yourself to it. I’d find a good Buddhist meditation teacher and start working with him. You still have a lot of work to do in finding a place in the world, I suspect. It takes time to find your compassion and desire to help others, even if you are not motivated to do things in the first place.

The mind is a wonderful thing

That is a considerable thing to want, a high measure of spiritual achievement. Not everyone who aspires to it makes it that far. You can hedge your bets some, acquire some normal skills which will allow you to live an ordinary life.

The golden rule is pretty universal. It goes, do to others as you wish them to do to you.

@Kalki Avatar The more conditioning you acquire, the more diffuse your effort is. It is like seeing through a lot of layers of coloured glass stacked on top of each other. That is why a lot of holy men go on extended retreats in mountainous areas. Prolonged silence and simple routines and a lot of meditation allow you to shed conditioning and digest the essential. Training the mind in letting go accelerates this process. Media fasting helps a lot as well. Osho’s dynamic meditation can also cathart away a lot of material. Yoga helps. The question is to come to a focus, preferably on one method. I won’t say Leo’s favourite 5meo won’t help you achieve something, but i am beginning to suspect it has its own pitfalls.

I listened to the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview, I was not terribly impressed. There seemed to be a lot of mind material in what he was saying, it doesn’t change the essential questions of samsara. If you get a grounding in the teachings of The Buddha it becomes pretty straightforward to see which channellers or teachers are talking bovine ejecta.

There are some people who say everything is one. But then, people will say just about anything...

I’ve wondered about this, and thought that perhaps enlightenment is more common than we think, but since it is a phenomenon of no-mind it is often not visible to the part of us that is still wrapped up in the mind. The links between the no-mind and the mind are often not clearly established, and the mind carries a lot of baggage, so if the no-mind experiences enlightenment perhaps the mind won’t notice. A friend of mine spent six months meditating two hours every day, and then had an experience around a raspberry which he ate. It was as if all his senses came alive to that raspberry, it was a deep bliss, and the next morning he woke up with no desire for smoking, he changed his eating habits, his blood pressure reverted to normal and he no longer needed meds for it after many years, and he felt energetic and very creative. He ended up buying a lot of materials from an arts and crafts store and became an artist. He taught himself to play the violin. It was a turning point in his life. Now I wouldn’t say this friend suddenly became wise and cosmically knowledgeable, but something definitely happened to him. Perhaps it was a mini-enlightenment which didn’t fully penetrate to his mind.

It is not wise to force these things, if you do one day it may fail you.

Buddhism differs from a ‘religion’ in that the general approach is not to take teachings on faith but to test them and use them only if they are beneficial, efficacious, and true. This then builds confidence in the teachings.

I was just listening to his ‘weirdest stories’ on YouTube because it is a great way to loosen up the mind. It made me think that perhaps the world is a bit more magical than I thought. Anyway it started me reading through his quotes on Goodreads, and I came across this quote: “Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.” And that put me in mind of a story that Da Free John used to tell, about how enlightenment is like the unclenching of a fist that has been clenched for such a long time that it’s gotten stuck in that pose. Put the two together and suddenly Terence McKenna is talking about enlightenment! It makes me wonder that maybe the Mushroom is something like a Buddha’s rainbow body, existing beyond in the multiverse...

I think it’s misleading of Frank Yang to talk of fucking the universe as an enlightened goal. It gives totally the wrong impression to listeners, although it might be good click baiting.