kinesin

@soos_mite_ah Wanting to own a home generally becomes more relevant to people once they start planning a family, choosing a place for their children to grow up etc. People don't want to start a life somewhere only to have to move out 4 years later when the landlord randomly decides to sell the property and then have to pull their child out of school and separate them from any local friends they might have made. Owning a house provides stability and allows you to make real longterm plans, which becomes a much more important thing once you have others relying on you.

@fopylo When you do your 30 minutes mindfulness meditation at night, what is it that you're being mindful of? As an experienced meditator (15 years), I can't see any meaningful difference between a nonspecific sitting mindfulness session and a 'Do Nothing' meditation session. Yes, both of those are extremely important. Yoga keeps you physically loose and strong, and also functions as a good foundation for mindfulness. Journalling will order and develop your thoughts, leading to a lot of insight. Do you feel as though all this is getting too much for you to fit in to your daily routine?

@JonasVE12 Stop imposing your own judgments onto OP. If he wants to enjoy having a few drinks socially, there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

None of this fits my experience of turquoise at all. Infact, even using the word 'experience' for it doesn't seem appropriate to me. The impression I got from your post is that of a person at roughly stage orange describing a single peak experience.

Some people get addicted to it. I fell into that trap myself back in my early 20s and it becomes a pretty miserable time eventually. If you do it too often, you start to see the darkness behind the fun. I think you're right though, total abstinence isn't the way to go, but it can be tricky for some people to find proper moderation.

Breathe your life away

@BlackMaze My biggest piece of advice is don't just contemplate in your own head, but do it through writing instead. If you spent 30 minutes every day (that's about 2 pages) doing contemplative writing with the intention of figuring out your conclusions and their origins, within 6 months you would have done more contemplation than most people do in a lifetime. When you write, just do a lot of what you did when posting this thread. Ask questions, and investigate every answer. One of the most fascinating aspects of contemplation is the fact that when you ask a question like that and then simply pause for a moment, an answer will almost always come to you. So you can force the process of contemplation by asking questions of yourself, recieving an answer, investigating the answer and asking more questions, etc etc etc

@Zion Meditation is the foundational practice to basically everything, so I'd suggest starting with that for now, plus once you get more comfortable with it it'll greatly help your shadow work and everything else. For 10 minutes per day, simply sit, close your eyes and bring your awareness to your breathing. When you get distracted, take a moment to notice whatever distracted you, then bring your awareness back to the breath. If you get bored or frustrated, take a moment to notice how the emotion feels in your body, then bring your awareness back to the breath. After 2 weeks, put it up to 15 or 20 minutes. When starting out, the only thing you're actually doing by keeping your attention on your breathing is developing focus and concentration. Once you develop this to a point where you can stay with the breath for around 10 minutes straight without a single distraction, then you'll be ready to move onto other more varied meditation practices and shadow work if you choose to.

Let's cut through the vagueness - what is the habit which you're interested in starting?

@Nos7algiK I get the sense from reading the first paragraph of your comment that you believe 'mental illness' refers to something big and scary which you feel you have to defend people from any 'accusation' of. You can rest assured that I have extensive first and secondhand experience of various mental illnesses and hold no negative judgment about it whatsoever. Persistent visual hallucinations are a symptom, which may point to an issue of concern. If a person has a persistent cough, that may be a symptom of illness too... but considering physical illness isn't as stigmatised as mental illness, if I were to say "maybe you should get that cough checked out" nobody would tell me it 'wasn't for me to conflate it down to illness', and nobody would suggest that I was 'calling' them ill. I'm not accusing OP of anything, I'm simply saying that having a persistent visual hallucination of tendrils running through everything is something to keep an eye on, and that the moderators should think twice before giving vague nondual sermons in response to an actual symptom.

@Nos7algiK I've been meditating and exploring spirituality for 15 years - I'm fully aware of the things you describe, however that doesn't mean that visual hallucinations aren't anything to be concerned about. OP described seeing persistent visual hallucinations which have increased in severity since onset, and this is something the moderation team have a responsibility to pay attention to, as per the new guidelines which were recently imposed by Leo.

Whatever happened to the proposed changes and plans to give certain moderators a more active role in keeping an eye out for signs of mental illness in members? It seems that over the past week there's been quite an increase in members making threads describing worrying symptoms, but rather than seeing moderators showing concern what I'm seeing most is moderators simply feeding into the person's delusions. Is support happening behind the scenes?

@tsuki His point though, is that often when a thing is 'notoriously difficult' for honest and intelligent people to understand it's because it actually doesn't make any sense. Less intelligent people who aren't as aware of their own judgments go on to claim understanding of it, when all they actually did was essentially scry their own personal interpretation out of the text. Infact, Derrida cannot be understood because there is nothing there to understand. If there were infact something real within his works to grasp onto, that essence itself would be subject to deconstruction and it would be immediately torn down. Critique is the favourite pastime of the mid-witted, and ultimately to those midwits, Derrida stands as a mythological symbol who gives them not only permission to critique, but makes the action appear honourable. Get 2 Derrida sycophants together and they'll have a great time for hours telling one another that they've misunderstood it all, and each will happily play the social game of listening intently in exchange for the same in return while really, neither of them understands anything the other has said. Ironically though for a philosophy founded in the belief that one cannot truly understand things, the sycophants will never dare to admit their own failure to understand.

Why don't you say what you actually mean? What are you trying to show us? What's the intention behind reposting the clip?

@sethman That isn't what the quote means, it's nothing to do with souls.

@Hulia Pamuk is a big fan of Dostoevsky, infact he once said that reading The Brothers Karamazov changed his life. If you like Pamuk's work, I can't recommend Dostoevsky enough... he truly is the master of writing from different character perspectives.

Debating yourself is one of the most powerful practices you can do, because in order to do it effectively you'll need to transcend the ego and channel different characters with different perspectives. To get a good sense of just how powerful the process can be, I suggest looking into 2 figures - Fyodor Dostoevsky and Quentin Tarantino. Both are able in their writing to channel such deeply held perspectives that their characters come across as fully complex human beings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphony_(literature)

@habed345 The answer is simple really - when you contemplate the concept of 'god', you have a certain thing in mind, and that thing seems unbelievable to you. When another person contemplates the concept of 'god', they have a different thing in mind, and that thing seems believable to them. If the other person were to see the concept the same way you do, likely they wouldn't believe it either. If you were to see the concept the way they do, you'd believe it. If you took 1000 people and asked them what 'god' is and were able to peer inside their minds and see what they were actually thinking, you'd see 1000 different ways of understanding god. In my experience a lot of atheists fall victim to their own misconceptions, like for example myself back a long time ago when I was an atheist, I was under the impression that when people spoke of 'god' they were referring to essentially a giant man who lives in another dimension and watches everything, nudging events here and there. This sounded utterly fanciful to me, so I dismissed anyone who believed in 'god' as being a fool who believes in something silly. Somehow it never occurred to me that what I thought they believed, wasn't what they actually believe.

@Someone here You already know the answer to the question - though this question wasn't intended to be answered, it's supposed to prompt a person to imagine reality without a conscious observer so that they can begin to transcend the lens of the ego. In terms of answering it - we have to split 'sound' into its 2 components. There's the raw material aspect which as you say is simply a wave moving through a medium, then there's the subjective experience of sound which is called qualia. Does the sound wave exist if nobody is around to observe it? Sure. Does the sound qualia exist if nobody is around to observe it? No. Not to rain on anyone's parade here, but let me repost a correction I made a previous time on this forum when the double slit experiment was mentioned, hopefully to clear up any misunderstandings about what it is.

I probably should have given more detail before using the words 'god' and 'demons' which may have given the wrong impression (for example making people imagine evil monsters sending messages to you from a hell dimension or something), but really my usage of the words refers to something quite mundane. By my definition, 'God' is everything in the universe that is actually true and conducive to real good, and 'communications from God' are signs and 'messages' witnessed in reality which when followed, genuinely make things better because they are actually based in truth. Demons on the other hand refers to things which are actually not in-line with truth, and so if you follow them you'll be led away from truth (away from God) and negative consequences will arise as a result. Angel numbers are a 'human' thing, a byproduct of the brain's ability to recognise order in chaos where sometimes no order may actually exist, but just because your brain gives you the sensation that something is actually good and true, doesn't mean it is. Ultimately, the proof is in the result. If you get genuine messages from God and follow them dutifully, it leads to good outcomes because it was a hint from actual truth. If you actually consistently follow the angel numbers however... well, just try it for a few weeks. If you think when you look at your clock and see a string of numbers that that's a message telling you to do something, then actually do it. Give your life over to the numbers for a while, and see if it makes things better or worse for you. I'm telling you though, it'll make things worse. Yeah, sure, but spiritual entities don't work like this. Spiritual entities aren't 'supernatural', they aren't monsters from another dimension, they're more like mathematical constructs or physical laws. They're processes and patterns which a person can find themselves 'trapped' within, which lead a person away from what is good and true. As for the reasons why... there's too many to list. Sometimes a negative pattern can emerge in a family and be passed down for dozens of generations, and no person could ever hope to investigate its actual origins.

@levani Yeah 10ml is next to nothing in terms of having any effect on you.

@Javfly33 Night shift work will kill you. Find literally anything else.

@Javfly33 Social anxiety is a perfectly rational fear when you consider its origin as an evolved mechanism of threat detection. Sure today we live in a very safe, 'civilized' world where the people you meet generally aren't a threat to your life, but the deepest structures in your brain aren't necessarily aware of that. To them, being around other people is like being surrounded by a group of unknown apes who will literally tear you limb from limb if you do the wrong thing or even look at them in the wrong way.

You're assuming far too much. Actually, the reason why I have knowledge about this at all is because I myself got heavily into synchronicity in numbers between 2016-2018. I don't dismiss it out of ignorance, I dismiss it out of intense understanding. I took number patterns and other synchronicities as signs from ancient gods, and I learned the hard way that God doesn't communicate in those methods, only demons do.